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MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


Ata 
RULE 
aA Kies 


USO | 





MORALS 
IN EVOLUTION 


fee. LN COMPARATIVE ETHICS 


BY 


Pee. HOBHOUSE. DiLirr. 


MARTIN WHITE PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON, 
LATE FELLOW AND ASSISTANT TUTOR OF CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE, OXFORD, 
FORMERLY FELLOW OF MERTON COLLEGE 





NEW YORK 
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 


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PREFACE 


THE purpose of the present work is to approach the theory 
of ethical evolution through a comparative study of rules of 
conduct and ideals of life. In this branch of evolutionary 
science theory and fact sometimes tend to fall apart. Hypo- 
theses may be formed by the method of brilliant conjecture 
without any firm basis in the actual history of the moral con- 
sciousness, while that history as revealed in the mass of recorded 
customs and doctrines concerning conduct sometimes tends to be 
lost in a mass of anthropological detail wherein it is impossible 
to see the wood for the trees. The attempt made in these volumes 
is to ascertain the main features of development, and by piecing 
them together to present a sketch in which the essentials of the 
whole process will be depicted in outline. 

In this method of handling the subject, no hypothesis as 
to the causes of evolution is required. Even the hypothesis 

« of evolution itself is not strictly necessary. Our object is to 
T distinguish and classify different forms of ‘ethical ideas —a 
, “morphology ‘of ethics comparable to the physical morphology 
+ of animals and plants. The results of such a comparative 
© study, if firmly based on recorded facts, would remain standing 
@ if the theory of evolution were shattered. At the same time, 
‘Shere as elsewhere, the results of classification when seen in 
2 the light of evolutionary theory acquire a wholly new signifi- 
- cance and value. They furnish us with a conception of the 
> trend of human development based not on any assumption as 
- to the underlying causes at work, but on a matter-of-fact com- 


3 parison of the achievements reached at different stages of the 
a 

- process itself. 

3 V 

c 34 OF 

B hs e nd (egy & , @» 

a i r 


vi PREFACE 


Little, therefore, will be said here of the psychological forces 
which underlie the ethical consciousness; little of the socio- 
logical and other factors which accelerate or retard development. 
These lie for the most part outside our immediate province. 
It is the essential facts of development itself that we are seeking 
to ascertain. Such an inquiry encounters many difficulties of 
its own. Vast and complex subjects must be handled with a 
brevity which to one specially interested in them will appear 
quite inadequate. The conclusions of a hundred specialisms 
must be used by one who from the nature of the case cannot 
himself be a specialist in any of them. Hence the openings alike 
for error of detail and for disproportion of general handling are 
great. Nor is it possible to avoid subjects of controversy. For 
the study of development, the ethics of civilization are not less, 
but, if anything, more important than those of savagery, and 
have therefore received closer attention in this work. But the 
complexities of civilized ethics, interwoven as they are with 
religious and political doctrines, can only be treated within the 
limits of a general sketch by keeping strictly to what is distinctive 
and fundamental in each system, and of this only so much is 
selected for discussion as is deemed to have a bearing on ethical 
development. In such selection the general philosophic bias of 
the inquirer is only too apt to have an influence. Further, it is 
a part of the plan of the work to estimate critically the position 
of each system in the line of ethical development, and in such . 
criticism it is still harder to put aside all preconceived opinions. 
The alternative would be to omit the ethics of Christendom and 
the problems of modern thought altogether. This I felt would 
mutilate the inquiry, and I have accordingly endeavoured to 
treat these subjects precisely on the same footing and in the same 
spirit as others, that is to say, as phases of development to be 
critically but quite impartially examined. In the sketch of 
modern philosophy, however, I have briefly set forth the analysis 
of the fundamental problems which expresses my own views, 
and in the final chapter I have drawn some broad conclusions 
from the general trend of ethical development. 

My obligations to other writers are, I hope, adequately 


PREFACE vil 


acknowledged in detail. Dr. Westermarck’s important work on 
the Origin and Growth of the Moral Ideas would have been of 
immense value to me had it appeared a little earlier. It is 
particularly satisfactory to me to find that so far as we cover 
the same field my results generally harmonize with his, and 
this notwithstanding a material divergence in ethical theory. 
On almost every page of some of my chapters references to his 
volume might be added to my footnotes, and with certain 
questions raised by his inquiry I have dealt in an appendix. 
I have to thank many friends for advice as to reading on special 
subjects. Among them I should like to name Mr. Hagberg 
Wright of the London Library, Mr. Ll. Griffith, and the late 
Mr. W. T. Arnold. Prof. Vinogradoff and Dr. Estlin Carpenter 
have most kindly read large portions of the MS., and suggested 
many valuable criticisms, though of course neither of them is to 
be held responsible for anything that is here printed. Lastly, 
I have to thank Dr. Slaughter, Secretary of the Sociological 
Society, and Miss M. Harris, for undertaking the heavy and 
responsible task of verifying the references. 
L. T. HopyHovuse. 
Wimbledon, June 1906. 


PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION 


Apart from emendations on a few points of detail, to which 
reviewers or correspondents have kindly drawn my attention, no 
alterations have been made in this edition. I may take this 
opportunity of thanking Mr. G. F. Deas for useful information 
as to the Scottish Marriage Law, and I may perhaps be allowed 
_ to add that no greater service can be done to a book of this 
kind than the pointing out by specialists of errors of commission 
or omission in their respective provinces. 


November 1907. 


viii PREFACE 


PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION 


For the present edition the whole work has been revised and 
a good part rewritten. For this purpose I have largely made use 
of work done by myself in collaboration with Mr. G. C. Wheeler 
and Mr. M. Ginsberg, and published under the title of The 
Material Culture and Social Institutions of the Simpler Peoples, 
by Messrs. Chapman & Hall. The numerous references to that 
work must be taken as so many acknowledgments to my 
colleagues, and I have further to thank Mr. Ginsberg for help 
in the verification of references. My thanks are also due to 
Mr. R. R. Marett for valuable criticisms of the chapters dealing 
with early religious thought, and to Mr. F. H. Griffith, Mr.S. A. 
Cook, Dr. Estlin Carpenter and Dr. F. B. Jevons for useful 
suggestions. Also, since this book was first written, I have had 
the good fortune to be associated in academic work with Prof. 
Westermarck, Prof. Seligmann, Dr. Rivers and Dr. Haddon, 
from all of whom I have learnt something which I trust has 
contributed to the improvement of the work. 

L. T. Hosyovse. 
Highgate, 
April 1915, 


CHAP. 


VIII 


CONTENTS 


PART I 
THE STANDARD 


THE SCOPE AND METHOD OF COMPARATIVE ETHICS 


FORMS OF SOCIAL ORGANIZATION ° ° ° ° 


LAW AND JUSTICE . . . . ° . ° 


MARRIAGE AND THE POSITION OF WOMEN ° ° 
WOMEN IN THE CIVILIZED WORLD . . : . 
THE RELATIONS BETWEEN COMMUNITIES ° . 
CLASS RELATIONS : ° . ° . : ° 
PROPERTY AND POVERTY . . . . ° . 


SUMMARY ° ° se ® ° ° ° ° ° 


PART II 
THE BASIS 


THE EARLY PHASES OF THOUGHT . . . . 
ETHICAL CONCEPTIONS IN EARLY THOUGHT . . 
THE WORLD AND THE SPIRIT . . . ° . 


MONOTHEISM ° . ae : ° . ° ° 


PAGE 


1 


38 


—_ 70 


132 


179 


233 


270 


318 


354 


365 


419 


459 


489 


CHAP, 


VIII 


CONTENTS 


ETHICAL IDEALISM . : : . 
PHILOSOPHIC ETHICS . . 
MODERN ETHICS ° . : 
THE LINE OF ETHICAL DEVELOPMENT 


INDEX ° e e e e . 


PAGE 


527 
544 : 
568 
6138 


639 


LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS 


Alabaster = Alabaster, E.: Notes and Commentaries on Chinese Criminal 
Law, 1889. 

Amélineau = Amélineau: La Morale Egyptienne, etc., 1892. 

Annales = Annales du Musée du Congo elge. 

Apastamba = The Sacred Laws of the Aryas, as taught in the schools of 
eretents, etc. Translated by Georg Bihler. Books of the East. 
vol. i 

Azara = ea) F. D.: Voyage dans l’Amérique Méridionale. 


B.A. = Reports of the British Association. » 

Bancroft = Bancroft, H. H.: Native Races of the Pacific States. 

Batchelor = Batchelor, J.: The Ainu of Japan.. 

Baudhayana = The Sacred Laws of the Aryas. Translated by Georg 
Buhler. Part II. Vasishtha and Baudhayana: Sacred Books of the 
East, vol. xiv. 

Baumann = Baumann, O.: Durch Massailand zur Nilquelle. 

Beveridge = Beveridge, P.: The Aborigines of Victoria and Riverina. 

Blackstone = Blackstone : Commentaries on the Laws of England, 1765-9. 

Boaz = Boaz, Dr. F.: On the Indians of British Columbia. Reports of 
the British Association, 1888, 1889, 1890, 1891. 

Bodenstedt = Bodenstedt, F. M.: Die Volker des Kaukasus. 

Breasted = Breasted, J. H.: Ancient Records of Egypt. 

Brough Smyth = Brough Smyth : The Aborigines of Victoria. 

Bruns = Bruns, C. G.: Fontes Juris Romani Antiqui (4th ed.). 

Bryce = Bryce, Lord : Studies in History and Jurisprudence, 1901. 

Budge = Budge, E. A. W.: Book of the Dead, 1901. 

 Burgdt = Burgdt, J. R. M. van der: Dictionaire francaise-Kirundi. 

_ Busolt = Busolt, G.: Die Griechischen Staats-u. Rechtsaltertiimer, in 

I. E. P. von Miiller’s Handbuch der Klassischen Altertumswissen- 

schaft, Bd. IV, 1891. 


- Calvin = Calvin, J.: Institutes of the Christian Religion. Translated 
| by J. Allen, 1838. 
Cambridge Expedition = Cambridge Expedition to the Torres Straits, 
1904. 

Catlin = Catlin, G.: Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs and 
MN Conditions of the North American Indians, 1841. 

Chamberlain = Chamberlain, A. E.: Report on the Kootenay Indians of 
| 8.-E. British Columbia. Reports of the British Association, 1892. 
_ Codrington = Codrington, R. H.: The Melanesians. 
Corpus Juris = Ed. Richter, 1879-81. Note. References to the Council 
of Trent are taken from the earlier edition, 1839. 
_ Coudreau = Coudreau, H.: Chez nos Indiens. 
Crooke = Crooke, W.: The North-Western Provinces. 
Curr = Curr, E. M.: The Australian Race. 


- Dalton = Dalton, E. : Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal, 1872. 
_ Dareste = Dareste, R.: Etudes d’histoire du droit, 1889. 


xi 


xii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS 


Dawson = Dawson, J.: Australian Aborigines. 

De Groot = De Groot, J. H. H.: The Religious Systems of China, etc., 
1892. 

Dhammapada = Translated from the Pali by F. Max Miller. Sacred 
Books of the East, vol. x. 

Dorsey = Dorsey, J. A.: Omaha Sociology. Reports of the Bureau of 
Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution, 1881-2. 

A Study of Siouan Cults. R.B.E., xi. 

Douglas = Douglas, Sir R. K.: Society in China, 1894. 

Driver = Driver, 8. R.: A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Deuter- 
onomy, 1895. 

An Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament, 1897. 

Duncker = Duncker, M.: The History of Antiquity. Translated by 
M. EK. Abbott, 1877-83. 








° 

Ehrenreich = Ehrenreich, P.: Beitrige zur Vdélkerkunde Brasiliens. 
Konig. Museum fiir Vélkerkunde, Bd. IT. 

Ellis = Ellis, A. B.: The Tshi-speaking Peoples of the Gold Coast of West 
Africa, 1887. 

— The Yoruba-speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa, 
1894. 

Erman = Erman, A.: Life in Ancient Egypt. Translated by H. M. 
Tirard, 1894. 

Eschwege = Eschwege, C. W. von: Brasilien. 

Esmein = Esmein, A.: Histoire de la procédure criminelle en France, 
etc., 1882. 

Eyre = Eyre, E. J.: Journals of Expeditions. 


Farnell = Farnell, L. R.: The Cults of the Greek States, 1896. 

Fletcher and La Fléche = Fletcher, Miss, and La Fléche: The Omaha. 
Reports of the Bureau of Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution, 
XXVii. 

Fraser = Fraser, J.: The Aborigines of New South Wales. 

Frazer = Frazer, J. G.: The Golden Bough, a study in Comparative 
Religion (2nd and 3rd editions). 

Friedlander = Friedlander, L.: Darstellungen aus der Sittengeschichte 
Roms, etc., 1888-90. 


Girard = Girard, P. F.: Manuel Elémentaire de Droit Romain, 1896. 

Goddard = Goddard, P. E.: Life and Culture of the Hupa. University 
of California Publications, vol. 1. 

Grinnell = Grinnell, G. B.: Blackfoot Lodge Tales. 

Pawnee Lodge Tales. 

Grotius = Grotius, Hugo de: De Jure Belli et Pacis. 


Haddon = Haddon, A. C.: Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological 
Expedition to Torres Straits. 

Hagen = Hagen, B.: Die Orang Kubu auf Sumatra. 

Hall = Hall, W. E.: A Treatise on International Law, 1904. 

Hammurabi. See Johns. 

Harnack = Harnack, A.: Outlines of the History of Dogma. Translated 
from the third German edition by J. Millar, 1894-9. 

Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, 1894. 

Harrison = Harrison, J. E.: Prolegomena to the study of Greek Religion, 

1903. 

Hill-Tout = Hill-Tout, Ch.: British North America. 

Hollis = Hollis, A.: The Masai. Jdem. The Nandi. 

Hose and McDougall = Hose, Ch., and McDougall, W.: The Pagan Tribes 
of Borneo. 








LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS xiii 


Howard = Howard, G. E.: History of Matrimonial Institutions, 1904. 

Howitt = Howitt, A. W.: The Native Tribes of §.-E. Australia, 1904. 

Hunter = Hunter, W. W.: The Indian Empire. Tribner’s Oriental 
Series, 1878, etc. 

Huth = Huth, A. H.: The Marriage of Near Kin, etc., 1887. 


I. A. E. = Internationales Archiv fur Ethnographie. 
Ihering = Ihering, R. von: Evolution of the Aryan. Translated from 
the German by A. Drucker, 1897. 
—— Geist des rémischen Rechts, auf den verschiedenem Stufen seiner 
| Entwickelung, 1891. 
im Thurn = im Thurn, E. F.: Among the Indians of Guiana. 
Ingram = Ingram, J. K.: A History of Slavery and Serfdom, 1895. 


J. A. I. = Journal of the Anthropological Institute. 

Jastrow = Jastrow, Morris: The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, 1895. 

Jenks = Jenks, E.: Law and Politics in the Middle Ages, 1898. 

Jevons = Jevons, F. B.: An Introduction to the History of Religion, 1902. 

Johns = Johns, C. H. W.: The Oldest Code of Laws in the World (Ham- 
murabi). 

Johnston = Johnston, Sir H. H.: George Grenfel and the Congo. 

Uganda Protectorate. 

J. R. A. S. = Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. 





K. and K. = Fison and Howitt, A. W.: Kamilaroi and Kurnai. 

Kohler u. Peiser = Kohler und Peiser: Aus dem Babylonischen Rechts- 
leben. 

Hammurabi’s Gesetz, 1904. 

Koran = Koran, Parts I and II. Translated by E. H. Palmer. Sacred 
Books of the East, vols. vi and ix. 

Kuenen = Kuenen, A.: The Religion of Israel to the fall of the Jewish 
State. Translated from the Dutch by A. H. May, 1873. 





La Cour and Appel = La Cour, P., and Appel, J.: Die Physik auf Grund 

__ ihrer geschichtlichen Entwickelung, etc. Ubersetzung von G. Siebert. 

Laffitte = Laffitte, P.: A General View of Chinese Civilization, etc. Trans- 
lated by J. C. Hall, 1887. 

Lang, G. 8. = Lang, G. 8. : The Aborigines of Australia. 

Lang, J. D. = Lang, J. D.: Queensland, Australia. 

Lecky = Lecky, W. E. H.: History of European Morals from Augustus 
to Charlemagne, 1877. 

Legge = Legge, J.: The Chinese Classics, 1861-72. Vol. i, Confucian 
Analects, ete.; vol. ii, Works of Mencius; vol. iii, The Shoo-King 
(two parts); vol. iv, The She-King (two parts). 

Leist = Leist, B. W. : Greco-italische Rechtsgeschichte, 1884. 

_ Letourneau = Letourneau, C.: La Condition de la Femme dans les 

| diverses races et civilisations, 1903. (La Femme.) 

La Guerre dans les diverses races humaines, 1895. (La Guerre.) 

— L’évolution de l’Esclavage dans les diverses races humaines, 1885. 
(L’Esclavage.) 

Ling Roth = Ling Roth, H.: Natives of Sarawak. 

Loskiel = Loskiel, G. H.: Geschichte der Mission unter den Indianern. 

Luther = Luther, Martin: Luther’s Primary Works, edited by Wace and 
Buchheim, 1896. 





Magyar = Magyar, L.: Reisen in Sidafrika. 
Manu = Manu, Laws of. Translated by Georg Bihler. Sacred Books 
of the East, vol. xxv. 


xiv LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS 


Martin = Martin, R.: Die Inlandstémme der Malayischen Halbinsel. 

Martius = Von Martius: Beitrage zur Ethnographie Amerikas. 

Maspero = Maspero, G.: The Dawn of Civilization: Egypt and Chaldea. 
Edited by A. H. Sayce. Translated by M. L. McClure, 1901. 

—— Recueil de Travaux, relatifs 4 la philologie et 4 l’archéologie Egyp- 
tienne et Assyrienne. Publié sous la direction de G. Maspero, 1870. 
(Recueil.) 

Meissner = Meissner, B.: Beitrige zum Altbabylonischen Privatrecht, 1893. 

De Servitute Babylonico—Assyriaca, 1882. 

Metz = Metz, J. F.: The tribes inhabiting the Nilgherry Hills. 

Mommsen = Mommsen: Zum Aaltesten Strafrecht der Kulturvélker, 1905. 

Montefiore = Montefiore, C. G.: Lectures on the Origin and Growth of 
Religion, as illustrated by the Religion of the Ancient Hebrews. 
Hibbert Lectures, 1892. 

Mooney = Mooney, J.: The Kiowa. Reports of the Bureau of Ethnology 
of the Smithsonian Institution, xvii. 

Morgan = Morgan, L. H.: Houses and MHouselife of the American 
Aborigines, 1877. 

The League of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois, 1851. "Eos ) 

Miller = Miller, F. W. K.: Batak-Sammlung. Veréf. aus dem K. 
Museum fur Volkerkunde, Bd. ITI. 

Miller = Miller, W. Max: Die Liebespoesie der Alten Aegypter, 1897. 

Muir = Muir, J.: Original Sanscrit Texts on the Origin and History of 
the People of India, 1868-84. 5 vols. 

Munzinger = Munzinger, W.: Ostafrikanische Studien. 

Murdoch = Murdoch, J.: Point Barrow Expedition. Reports of the 
Bureau of Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution, 1887. 








Nieboer, Dr. = Nieboer, H. J. : Slavery as an Industrial System. 


Old = Old, W. G.: The Book of the Simple Way of Laotze, 1904. 

Oppenheimer = Oppenheimer, H.: The Rationale of Punishment. 

Oppert = Oppert, J.: La Condition des Esclaves & Babylone, ete. Ex- 
traits des comptes rendus de ]’Académie des Inscriptions, 1888. 

Orbigny = Orbigny, Dessalines, A. D’.: Voyage dans Jl Amérique 
Meridionale. 

Overbergh = Overbergh, Cyr. von: Collection de monographies ethno- 
graphiques. 

Parker, Mrs. = Parker, Mrs. K. L.: The Euahlayi Tribe. 

Paulitschke = Paulitschke, Ph.: Ethnographie Nord-Ost-Afrikas. 

Petermann, Dr. = Dr. Petermann’s Mittheilungen aus Justus Perthes’ 
Geographischem Anstalt. 

Petrie, Flinders = Petrie, W. M. Flinders: Religion and Conscience in 
Ancient Egypt, 1898. 

Pike = Pike, L. O.: History of Crime in England, 1873-6. 

Pollock and Maitland = Pollock, Sir Frederick, and Maitland, F. W.: 
The History of English Law before the time of Edward I, 1898. 

Post = Post, A. H.: Afrikanische Jurisprudenz, 1887. (A. J.) 

Grundriss = Grundriss der Ethnologischen Jurisprudenz, 1894. 

Powell = Powell, J. W.: Wyandot Government. Reports of the Bureau 
of Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution, I. 

Powers = Powers, 8.: ‘Tribes of California. Contributions to N. A. 
Ethnology, vol. iii, 1877. 





Ratzel = Ratzel: History of Mankind. Translated from the second 
German edition by A. J. Butler, 1891. 
R. B. E. = Reports of the Bureau of Ethnology of the Smithsonian 


Institution. 


LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS XV 


Reclus = Reclus, E.: Primitive Folk. Studies in Comparative Ethnology, 
1889. 

Reed = Reed, W. A.: The Negritos of Zambales. Department of the 
Interior. Ethnological Publications, vol. ii, part 1. 

Risley = Risley: Tribes of Bengal. 

Rocheforte, de = Rocheforte, de: History of the Antilles, 1665. 

Ross = Ross, B. R.: Notes on the Tinnehs and Chepewayans. Reports 
of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, 1866. 

Roth = Roth, W. E.: Ethnological Studies among the N.-W.-C. Queens- 
land Aborigines. 


Saussaye, de la = Saussaye, P. C. de la: Manual of the Science of Religion. 

Translated from the German by B. 8. Colyer-Ferguson. 

Sayce = Sayce, A. H.: Records of the Past, etc., 1873. New Series, 1890. 

Schoolcraft = Historical and Statistical Information respecting the Indian 
Tribes, etc., 1851-60. 

Schooleraft-Drake = Drake, F. 8.: The Indian Tribes of the United 
States. Based on Schoolcraft’s ‘“ Archives of Aboriginal Knowledge.”’ 

Schréder = Schréder, R.: Lehrbuch der deutschen Rechtsgeschichte. 

** Simpler Peoples ’’ = The Material Culture and Social Institutions of the 
Simpler Peoples. By L. T. Hobhouse, G. C. Wheeler, and M. Ginsberg. 

_ Skeat and Blagden = Skeat, W. W., and Blagden, C. O.: Pagan Races 
of the Malay Peninsula. 

Spencer and Gillen (I) = Native Tribes of Central Australia, 1899. 

(II) = Northern Tribes of Central Australia, 1904. 

Starcke = Starcke, C. N.: The Primitive Family, 1889. 

Steinen, von = Steinen, Carl, von den: Unter den Naturvélkern Zentral- 
Brasiliens. 

Steinmetz = Steinmetz, 8. R.: Rechtsverhaltnisse von eingeborenen 
Vélkern in Afrika und Ozeanien. 

Stenin, von = Stenin, P. von: Die Kurden des Gouvernments Eriwan. 
Globus, LXX, 1896. 

Stephen = Stephen, Sir J. F.,: A History of the Criminal Law of England, 
1883. 





Swanton = Swanton, J. R.: The Thlinkeet. Reports of the Bureau of 
Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution, xxvi. 


Teit = Teit, J.: The Lillooet Indians. Edited by F. Boaz. Publications 
of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, vol. ii, part 5, 1900. 

The Thompson Indians of British Columbia. Edited by F. Boaz. 
Publications of the Jesup Expedition, vol. i. 

Thomson = Thomson, J.: To the Central African Lakes and Back. 

Thouar = Thouar, A.: Explorations dans l’Amérique du Sud. 

Thurston = Thurston, E.: Castes and Tribes of Southern India. 

Tschudi von = Tschudi, J. J. von: Reisen durch Stidamerika. 

Tylor = Tylor, E. B.: Primitive Culture, 1903. 


Viollet = Viollet, P.: Histoire du droit civil frangais, 1893. 





Waitz, G. = Waitz, G.: Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte, 1880. 
Waitz, T. = Waitz, T.: Anthropologie der Naturvélker, 1859-72. 
Westermarck = Westermarck, E.: History of Human Marriage, 1901. 
Origin and Growth of the Moral Ideas, 1906. 
Wilamowitz = Wilamowitz-Méllendorf, U. von: Staat und Gesellschaft 
. der Griechen und Rémer. 

Wines = Wines, F. H.: Punishment and Reformation, etc., 1895. 
Wissowa, = Wissowa: Religion und Kultus der Rémer, 1902. In I. E. P. 

von Miiller’s Handbuch der Klassischen Altertumswissenschaft, Bd. 5. 

Woods = Woods, J. B.: Native Tribes of S. Australia. 





xvi LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS 


Z. f. V. R. = Zeitschrift fiir Vergleichende Rechtswissenschaft. 

Zend Avesta = Zend Avesta, Part I, The Vaudidad, translated by James 
Darmesteter. Part II, The Sirézahs, etc., translated by James 
Darmesteter. Part III, The Yasna, etc., translated by L. H. Mills. 
Sacred Books of the East, vols. iv, xxili, xxxi. 

Z. K. = Zeitschrift fur Ethnologie. 

Zimmern, A. E. = The Greek Commonwealth. 

Zimmern, H. = Beitrage zur Kenntniss der babylonischen Religion: Die 
Beschworungstafeln Surpu. Ritualtafeln fiir den Wahrsager, Besch- 
worer und Sanger: Delitzsch u. Haupt Bibliothek, 1896. 

Zu Wied = Wied, Prinz M. zu: Reise in Brasilien. 


MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


PART | 
THE STANDARD 


CHAPTER I 
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF ETHICAL EVOLUTION 


1. THE object of the present work is to trace the evolution of 
the ethical consciousness as displayed in the habits and customs, 
rules and principles, which have arisen in the course of human 
history for the regulation of human conduct. In no part of the 
world, and at no period of time, do we find the behaviour of 
men left to unchartered freedom. Everywhere human life is in 
a measure organized and directed by customs, laws, beliefs, ideals, 
which shape its end and guide its activities. As this guidance 
of life by rule is universal in human society, so upon the whole 
it is peculiar to humanity. . There is no reason to think that any 
animal except man can enunciate or apply general rules of con- 
duct. Nevertheless there is not wanting something that we can 
eall an organization of life in the animal world. How much of 
intelligence underlies the social life of the higher animals is 
indeed extremely hard to determine. In the aid which they often 
render to one another, in their combined hunting, in their play, 
in the use of warning cries, and the employment of “ sentinels,” 
which is so frequent among birds and mammals, it would appear 
at first sight, that a considerable measure of mutual understand- 
ing is implied, that we find at least an analogue to human custom, 
to the assignment of functions, the division of labour, which 
mutual reliance renders possible. How far the analogy may be 
pressed, and whether terms like “‘ custom ” and ‘“‘ mutual under- 
standing,’ drawn from human experience, are rightly applicable 
to animal societies, are questions on which we shall touch pre- 
sently. Let us observe first, that as we descend the animal scale 

the sphere of intelligent activity is gradually narrowed down, 
B 


-— @ 


2 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


and yet behaviour is still regulated. The lowest organisms have 
their definite methods of action under given conditions. The 
Ameeba shrinks into itself at a touch, withdraws the pseudo- 
podium that is roughly handled, or makes its way round the small 
object which will serve it as food. Given the conditions, it acts 
in the way best suited to avoid danger, or to secure nourishment. 
We are a long way from the intelligent regulation of conduct 
by a general principle, but we still find action adapted to the 
requirements of organic life. 


2. Thus in the lowest grades of the organic world behaviour 
is already regulated, and regulated to some purpose. It will 
repay us to consider very briefly the method of this regulation, and 
to observe how it changes as we ascend the organic scale. In 
the lowest grades of life, then, whether plant or animal, we find 
behaviour pretty rigidly determined by the structure of the 
organism itself. The sensitive plant or the protozoon does not 
act at random, but it is so constructed that when stimulated in 
a particular way by some outer object it responds to this stimulus 
by some definite motion. In this way, for example, the tentacles 
of the Venus’ Flytrap close over the luckless insect which has 
settled upon its leaf, a touch on any one of the spines of the leaf 
causing the two halves of the leaf-end to fold inward as on a 
hinge. The insect is thus enclosed, and certain glands upon the 
leaf secrete the digestive juice to aid in its assimilation. In the 
same apparently mechanical manner the tentacles of a sea- 
anemone close over a small object which lodges among them. 
Actions of this kind, which may generally be called reflexes, for 
the most part serve a function which we can readily discover and 
assign in the life of the organism; for example, in the instances 
mentioned they secure its food. But though they serve this 
purpose it is almost certain that we should be mistaken in re- 
garding them as purposeful or intelligent in character. Reflexes 
of this type proceed with equal certainty and regularity, whether 
in the particular case they happen to be good or bad for the 


organism. We can most easily understand their character by — 


considering any one of the numerous reflex actions which we our- 
selves perform. If a small foreign object—a speck of dust or a 
crumb of food—gets into our windpipe, we cough; that is to say, 


a series of muscular contractions is set up whereby the foreign © 


1 Lloyd Morgan, Animal Intelligence, p. 26. Observe that innutritious 
objects, such as particles of sand, do not cause a regular contraction of the 


tentacles, though their impact is followed by a secretion. In other words, — 


the re-action only follows in its completeness in cases where it serves a 
purpose. 


ETHICAL EVOLUTION 3 


body is expelled. This serves a purpose which is very useful 
to us, but it is not done by the aid of our intelligence. It is 
done by our nerves and muscles upon their own account without 
the aid of our will, and even, as we know, sometimes against our 
will. Similarly, if an object comes straight at our eyes, we 
blink, and we do so even though we know we are not going to 
be hit. The blink normally serves the purpose of protecting 
the eyes, but the number of people who can refrain from blink- 
ing when it is known to be useless is comparatively small. We 
blink on any given occasion, not because as intelligent persons 
we wish to protect our eyes, but because a certain structure of 
nerves and muscles exists in us, which, being touched as it were 
by the stimulus of something coming straight at the eyes, is 
brought into operation automatically. This structure is ordi- 
narily useful to us. Similarly, it was useful to our ancestors, 
and the biological theory is that it has grown up and been 
perpetuated in us because from generation to generation it has 
on the balance been found useful. Those in whom it failed would 
be likely to lose their sight, and with their sight they might well 
lose their lives, and losing their lives they would fail to leave 
descendants, and so their stock would become blotted out. Con- 
versely, the same conditions would favour the perpetuation and 
increase of a stock in which the structure was well developed. 
This explanation may be applied to all the simplest methods 
of adjusting responses to stimulus. In every generation those 
individuals who best responded to the circumstances in which 
they were placed from time to time would tend to survive in the 
largest numbers. The physical structure best suited to give these 
responses would thus be perpetuated, and while the variations 
for the worse would be eliminated the variations-for the better 
would be preserved. In this way, according to the biological 
theory, physical structures arise which fixedly determine the 
most suitable kind of response to the kind of stimuli which 
most frequently affect organisms of any given species. Thus, 
without the exercise of any intelligence on the part of any in- 
dividual organism, without the formation of the idea of a purpose 
at any single point in the whole history, certain fundamental 
purposes are, nevertheless, served, and the conditions which 
secure that they should be served are perpetuated. Here, then, 
we have a form of the regulation of behaviour proceeding without 
the intervention of any intelligent agency.! 

1%.e. in the evolving organisms themselves. Whether the whole 


“plan” of evolution implies a “planning” Mind is a deeper question 
which I do not raise here. I touch on it below; Part II. chap. vii. 


4 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


$3. As judged from the point of view of its efficiency in pre- 
serving the race, this method of regulating conduct has many 
defects. It is excessively rigid and excessively narrow. If a 
given contraction must follow a given touch, the results may 
upon the whole be good, but they may also in many instances 
be bad. Poisonous substances may be swallowed instead of 
nutritious food; dangerous enemies may be approached as 
though they were prey. Observation of young animals reveals 
many instances of this want of adaptation, and many of the 
actions, which at first sight so wonderfully dovetail into one 
another as to suggest a marvellous foresight of what the animal 
will require, turn out on further investigation to be blind re- 
sponses to a physical stimulus which very often lead to fatal 
results. One instance may suffice here:—The larva of the 
Sitaris beetle provides for its future career by attaching itself 
to a bee which finds it in all necessaries. But it is not any 
knowledge of the bee and what the bee will do for it which 
impels the larva, for it will similarly attach itself to any hairy 
object which may come near—for example, to any other hairy 
insect; and probably a large number perish in this manner.+ 
The larva is so constructed, in fact, that contact with, or proximity 
to, a hairy insect sets up the motions requisite for attaching the 
larva to that insect. In a sufficiently large proportion of cases 
the insect thus clung to is a bee, and by this means this particular 
structure enables the Sitaris beetle to perpetuate itself. But it 
can easily be seen that action will be far more efficiently regulated 
if the inherited structure can make some allowance for the 
difference of circumstances, if some plasticity, some capacity for 
modification should arise, and this, in point of fact, we find when — 
we pass from the mechanical reflexes which we have hitherto © 
considered to the instincts of higher animals. 
Instinct is a relatively permanent condition of an animal, 
which will set it upon a_train of actions, and in carrying out 
these actions, considerable variations may be possible according 
to the particular circumstances in which the animal finds itself 
placed. Thus in the springtime it is the instinct of birds to 
pair, to build nests, to tend their eggs and feed their young. © 
There is no doubt at all on a survey of the whole evidence that — 
the impulse to build nests and, broadly speaking, the method ~ 
of building them are hereditary. But though hereditary, they 
are also modifiable. The method of nest-building is varied, the 
materials used are varied. The old bird builds his nest better 
than the young one, showing that even here practice makes | 
1 Cambridge Natural History, vi. 272. | : 






ETHICAL EVOLUTION 5 


perfect. The oriole, which usually conceals its nests from snakes 
and hawks, builds quite openly in villages where these enemies 
are not to be feared.1 The orchard oriole builds a shallow nest 
on stiff branches, but on the slender twigs of the weeping willow 
builds deep, so that the young are not thrown out by the swaying 
of the nest. Even in the feeding of the young, cases are recorded 
in which apparently intelligent adaptation of the ordinary practice 
through some special circumstances proves to he wel! within the 
power of the bird. 

As opposed to reflex actions, and as opposed to the popular 
idea of instinct, the facts show that, particularly as we ascend 
the animal scale, instincts are not perfect at birth, but are 
improved by practice. They are not rigid, but are capable of 
adaptation to varying circumstances; they are not, as it were, 
planned out by the inherited nature of the individual in all 
their detail. Yet nevertheless they rest upon a hereditary 
basis which has grown up under those same conditions which 
we have already seen laying down and fixing the structure 
which determines reflex action. It is important here to observe 
closely what these conditions are. We must bear in mind that 
it is not the survival of the individual which, upon the principles 
laid down by the biologists, will determine the growth of that 
structure upon which reflex action and instinct alike depend. 
If we personify Natural Selection, we may say that what it has 
in view is not the individual but the stock, or if we avoid personi- 
fication and thereby lengthen our statement, we must say that 
the conditions which determine the growth and perpetuation 
of a given structure are not that that structure should preserve 
the life of each individual in which it exists, but that it should 
tend to preserve the breed of that individual. In the main these 
two objects fall into one, since it is only by having its own life 
preserved for a certain time that an individual can bring young 
ones into existence; but where they diverge, the young should, 
according to the logic of the argument, get the preference from 
natural selection, and so, in point of fact, the act of procreation 
is in some instances fatal, and throughout the animal world the 
actions necessary for reproduction are as important and as closely 
determined by the structure of the individual as the actions neces- 
sary for the maintenance of its own life. But on this point a 
very important difference emerges as we ascend the animal scale, 
In the lower layers of organic creation, the maintenance of the 
stock is principally secured by the vast numbers, running up even 
to millions, of individuals which may spring from a single indi- 

1 A. R. Wallace, Natural Selection, p. 114, etc. 


ae MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


vidual in the course of one season. In the higher ranks of animal 
life the birth-rate rapidly diminishes. Each individual produces 
a few, or, in the end, a single young one annually, or perhaps 
even less frequently, and makes up for its infertility by the care 
which it devotes to the rearing of its more limited family. There 
igs every reason to regard this parental affection, which begins 
in such elementary methods as the attachment of eggs to a 
suitable object and proceeds from the very rough nest-building 
found among a few species of fish and among the lower birds to 
the high degree of parental affection shown by the most intelligent 
birds and mammals, as instinctive in character and based upon 
hereditary impulses. The cat tends its young by instinct just 
as truly as it hunts mice by instinct, and, broadly speaking, the 
conditions under which each instinct has arisen are the same. 
Each fulfils the requirements of race maintenance and enables the 
animal to leave behind it progeny like itself. 

Precisely the same account may be given of the gregarious 
tendencies which become more developed and more useful to 
the species as we ascend the animal scale. Not only the social 
insects whose case presents peculiar difficulties, but many of the 
higher birds and mammals live in societies which are much larger 
than the natural family, and these societies are in a rudimentary 
way organized, that is to say, the members help one another. 
They play together, sometimes they hunt together; in a large 
number of interesting cases they employ sentinels who warn 
them of danger by an alarm note. “‘ Ibex, marmots and moun- 
tain sheep whistle, prairie dogs bark, elephants trumpet, wild 
geese and swans have a kind of bugle-call, rabbits stamp on the 
ground, sheep do the same, and wild ducks, as the writer has 
noticed, utter a very low caution quack to signify the enemy in 
sight.”’ 1 Here again there is no reason to doubt that the basis 
of behaviour is instinctive, but the instinct is modified as life 
proceeds. Strange as it may seem, young animals have no special 
instinct which bids them follow their own mothers. They will 
follow any large animal moving as their mothers do. They do not 
even know by instinct how to suck. A young lamb, for instance, 
will take whatever comes nearest into its mouth, say, a tuft of 
wool on its dam’s neck, and it is only by degrees, guided perhaps 
by smell, that it acquires the right method of feeding itself.? 


4. Thus, though the basis of the family and social life of the 
higher animals is laid in.certain tendencies or characteristics 


1 Cornish, Animals at Work and Play, p. 48. 
2 Lloyd Morgan, Habit and Instinct, pp. 114, 116. 


ETHICAL EVOLUTION 7 


inherited from their forbears, these tendencies do not set down 
rigid lines of behaviour which are perfect from the outset, but 
rather supply a kind of basis upon which the experience of the 
individual itself may operate. This brings us accordingly to a 
new factor in the regulation of behaviour. When a young chick 
has emerged from the egg it will peck readily, and on the whole 
with surprising accuracy, at any small object lying on the ground 
that catches its eye. Some of the things that it pecks at it will 
swallow—yolk of egg, for example, gratifies its cannibal tastes, 
and having once swallowed a bit of yolk it will peck at another 
with increased avidity. This pecking we may regard as a reflex 
and ascribe to an inherited mechanism which is set going by the 
stimulus administered to the eye by the sight of the object. 
But if instead of yolk of egg the chick happens to peck at a 
piece of orange-peel, or at a certain caterpillar which has appar- 
ently an unpleasant taste, it will check itself in mid-career, 
or, if too late to do so, will swallow the object with gestures 
which we take as signs of disgust, and we have some ground for 
this interpretation because after a very few experiences—some- 
times indeed a single instance—the chick learns to avoid objects 
of that kind; it continues to peck at the yolk, but rejects the 
caterpillar. Here, then, a new factor has intervened. The chick 
started with its hereditary mechanism wound up, as it. were, for 
the purpose of pecking at any small object that it came across, 
but its own experience has an effect upon this mechanism. It 
stops its working in relation to certain objects while it permits 
or even encourages and perfects it in relation to others. On the 
strength of our human experience we attribute to the chick 
pleasurable and painful feelings. We assume that the taste of 
the one object was pleasant and that of the other disgusting. 
Whether we have a right to draw this inference is a question 
which need not be argued here. Our main point for the present 
is that experience modifies an inherited mode of reaction, and it 
will be convenient to call this experience pleasurable or painful 
according as it tends to encourage and perfect the reaction, or to 
‘discourage and finally put a stop to it. Clearly, the power of 
thus learning by experience will be of immense advantage to a 
‘species in the way of making its behaviour more plastic and 
adapting it more closely to the requirements of its life. But the 
utility of this new mode of regulating conduct will depend upon 


one condition—the feelings of the animal must_ in the main 
correspond with the aotial requirements ot ita life. If all the 


the only result of the operation of experience would be to bring 


a 


8 . MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


the chick to a premature grave. But the feeling which the 

chick experiences is as much determined by the inherited structure 
of its brain and nerve organism as was the original tendency to 
peck. This inherited structure has grown up under precisely 
similar conditions, that is to say, it must upon the balance have 
assisted the ancestors of the chick in maintaining their stock and 
not tended to their destruction. What has happened, therefore, 
is that, in addition to a mere tendency to peck, the chick also 
inherits the structure which enables it to feel, and to feel in the 
main in a way that accords with the requirements of its life. 
The feelings of the individual, then, become the means by which 
within certain limits the behaviour of that individual is regulated, 
and thus far greater plasticity is gained for the behaviour itself. 
The animal which can thus learn by experience can afford to 
make its mistakes, and the more so as it has the fostering care of 
a mother to protect it from those mistakes which would be fatal. 

Thus the range of adaptation has increased. In place of the 
direct response coming mechanically, whether well or ill suited ~ 
to circumstances, in reply to some direct physical stimulus and 
persisting without variation through the life of the organism, 
there is room for a variation of behaviour according to the 
nature of the object with which the animal is brought into 
contact, as revealed by the experience of previous dealings with 
similar objects. The result is that a larger class of objects can 
be dealt with, and behaviour can be adequately adapted to the 
needs of the organism over a wider field. It is easy to see how 
this greater adaptability, arising from the power of the animal 
to utilize its own experiences, will work in with that plasticity 
of adaptation which we saw in the higher instincts. Instinct 
is always pressing the animal along the course which will satisfy 
it. If it can learn by experience what things satisfy and what 
things do not, it will be so much the better able to choose that 
course. 

Now the kind of experience thus far described does not carry 
the animal beyond the direct and immediate results of a given 
reaction. One kind of act gives pleasure and:another pain, and 
these pleasures and pains must, it would seem, be feelings of 
the agent itself; and though the act is suited to the feeling so 
as to secure the pleasure or avoid the pain, we cannot yet say 
that the animal acts with the intelligent purpose of securing 
the pleasurable or avoiding the painful experience. The full 
reasons for this caution need not be given here. It is sufficient 
_\ to say that this method of learning by experience retains many 
* of the features of a mechanical process, and where an animal 


ETHICAL EVOLUTION 9 


can learn so much and no more, we are to regard its behaviour 
rather as determined by the results of its past experience 
operating upon its brain structure than by an intelligent appre- 
hension of the future experiences which its action will secure 
for it. We shall best regard acts of this kind as still within the 
region of impulse, and as only one step upon the way to behaviour _ 
regulated by an idea of what is to happen in the future, and by 
desire or aversion for that happening. But we should remark 
that, still within the animal world, the capacity for learning by 
experience reaches a higher level. The dog, for example, which 
is scolded or beaten, let us say, for lying with its dirty paws upon 
a sofa, learns to avoid that sofa in the presence of its master for 
the future. But, in so doing, the dog will show a somewhat 
higher grade of intelligence than we find in the chick, for, as we 
know only too well, it will, if possessed of an ordinary measure of 
canine obstinacy, avail itself of the sofa if nobody is looking on, 
and make a hurried descent if it hears somebody coming. There 
is in this an element of intelligence which, when all the evidence 
is put together, appears to carry us beyond that simple modifica- 
tion of an inherited method of action which we find in the case of 
the chick. The dog does not simply avoid the sofa, he does not 
merely and stupidly associate a sofa with the beating, he continues 
to like the sofa and to get what he can out of it; he knows that 
it is some particular person who will punish him, and he may even 
disregard the presence of those members of the household whom 
experience has shown him to be less strict. In a word, his 
action has all the appearance of being intelligently adapted to 
obtaining one result and avoiding another. He seems to project 
himself into the future by however short a distance, and to 
know what will happen to him under certain conditions; and 
thus, as the result which he achieves appears to be the deter- 
mining factor in his action, we may admit that action to be 
definitely purposive. He not merely learns to prefer what is 
pleasurable in itself, and avoid what is painful in itself, but to 
do things which experience shows would have pleasurable 
results in the future, and avoid things which have painful results. 
We may say that he desires the one and has aversion for the 
other, and though it would not be strictly accurate to say that 
_ he desires pleasure, it is true to say that he desires what is pleasant 
and has an aversion for what is painful, and in this sense pleasur- 
able and painful feelings are still the guides, or indirectly the. 
guides, of his action. 

But the dog’s behaviour is not determined by his own feel- 
ings alone. The same intelligence which enables him to make 


10 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


this modest forecast of the future, also endows him with the 
power to recognize the individuals about him. He knows his 
master and his mistress; he distinguishes friends and enemies, 
human or animal, and, as we know, he is ready to fly to the 
assistance of the one or to the destruction of the other. He has 
every appearance of entering into the moods, as far as he can 
appreciate them, of those around him, and if we are sometimes 
inclined to an uncritical over-estimate of the dog’s under- 
standing, still a fair consideration of the whole of the facts leaves 
no reason to doubt that substantially we are correct in attribut- 
ing to him knowledge of other individuals, and interest in what 
they do or suffer. 

It is by no accident that the evidence of attachment and 
affection to other individuals, and of attention to the mate and 
the young in its higher developments, belongs almost exclusively 
to animals of the grade at which this higher form of intelligence 
begins to appear. Though the love for the young and the 
attachment to comrades have instinct for their basis, yet, as we 
have already seen, that instinct is highly plastic in its methods 
of effecting its ends, and in that plasticity evidences of in- 
telligence frequently appear. Thus we shall not go wrong in 
attributing to the higher animals in their simple social life, not 
only the elementary feelings, the loves and hates, sympathies 
and jealousies which underlie all forms of society, but also in a 
rudimentary stage the intelligence which enables those feelings to 
direct the operations of the animal so as best to gratify them. 


5. Thus, when we come to human society we find the basis 
for a social organization of life already laid in the animal nature 
of man. Like others of the higher animals, man is a gregarious 
beast. His interests lie in his relations to his fellows, in his 
love for wife and children, in his companionship, possibly in his 


rivalry and striving with his fellow-men. His loves and hates, 


his joys and sorrows, his pride, his wrath, his gentleness, his 
boldness, his timidity—all these permanent qualities, which run 
through humanity and vary only in degree, belong to his in- 
herited structure. Broadly speaking, they are of the nature of 
instincts, but instincts which have become highly plastic in 
their mode of operation, and which need the stimulus of experience 
to call them forth and give them definite shape. 


The mechanical methods of reaction which are so prominent — 


low down in the animal scale fill quite a minor place in human 
life. The ordinary operations of the body, indeed, go upon their 
way mechanically enough In walking or in running, in saving 


ETHICAL EVOLUTION 11 


ourselves from a fall, in coughing, sneezing or swallowing, we 
re-act as mechanically as do the lower animals; but in the dis- 
tinctly human modes of behaviour, the place taken by the 
inherited structure is very different. Hunger and thirst no 
doubt are of the nature of instincts, but the methods of satis- 
fying hunger and thirst are acquired by experience or by teach- 
ing. Love and the whole family life have an instinctive basis, 
that is to say, they rest upon tendencies inherited with the 
brain and nerve structure; but everything that has to do with 
the satisfaction of these impulses is determined by the experience 
of the individual, the laws and customs of the society in which 
he lives, the woman whom he meets, the accidents of their 
intercourse, and so forth. Instinct, already plastic and modi- 
fiable in the higher animals, becomes in man a basis of character 
which determines how he will take his experience, but without ~+. 
experience is a mere blank form upon which nothing is yet 
written. 

For example it is an ingrained tendency of average human 
nature to be moved by the opinion of our neighbours. This 
is a powerful motive in conduct, but the kind of conduct to 
which it will incite clearly depends on the kind of thing that 
our neighbours approve. In some parts of the world ambition 
for renown will prompt a man to lie in wait for a woman or 
child in order to add a fresh skull to his collection. In other 
parts he may be urged by similar motives to pursue a science 
or paint a picture. In all these cases the same hereditary or 
instinctive element is at work, that quality of character which 
makes a man respond sensitively to the feelings which others 
manifest towards him. But the kind of conduct which this 
sensitiveness may dictate depends wholly on the social environ- 
ment in which the man finds himself) Similarly it is, as the 
ordinary phrase quite justly puts it, “in human nature” to 
stand up for one’s rights. A man will strive, that is, to secure 
that which he has counted on as his due. But as to what he 
counts upon, as to the actual treatment which he expects wnder 
given circumstances, his views are determined by the “‘ custom 
of the country,” by what he sees others insisting on and obtain- 
ing, by what has been promised him, and so forth. Even such 
an emotion as sexual jealousy, which seems deeply rooted in the 
animal nature, is largely limited in its exercise and determined 
in the form it takes by custom. A hospitable savage, who will 
lend his wife to a guest, would kill her for acting in the same 
way on her own motion. In the one case he exercises his rights 
of proprietorship; in the other, she transgresses them. It is the 


fs 
1 


12 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


maintenance of a claim which jealousy concerns itself with, and 
the standard determining the claim is the custom of the country. 

In human society, then, the conditions regulating conduct are 
from the first greatly modified. Instinct, becoming vague and 
more general, has evolved into “ character,” while the intelli- 
. gence finds itself confronted with customs, to which it has to 
accommodate conduct. But how does custom arise? Let us 
first consider what custom is. Itis not merely a habit of action; 
but it implies also a judgment upon action, and a judgment 
stated in general and impersonal terms. It would seem to 
_ imply a bystander or third party. If A hits B, B probably hits 
back. It is his “ habit’? so to do. But if C, looking on, pro- 
nounces that it was or was not a fair blow, he will probably 
appeal to the “‘ custom ”’ of the country—the traditional rules of 
fighting, for instance,—as the ground of his judgment. That is, 
he will lay down a rule which is general in the sense that it 
would apply to other individuals under similar conditions, and 
by it he will, as an impartial third person, appraise the conduct 
of the contending parties. ‘The formation of such rules, resting 
as it does on the power of framing and applying general concep- 
tions, is the prime differentia of human morality from animal 
behaviour.1 The fact that they arise and are handed on from 
generation to generation makes social tradition at once the 
dominating factor in the regulation of human conduct. Without 
such rules we can scarcely conceive society to exist, since it is 
only through the general conformity to custom that men can 
understand each other, that each can know how the other will 
act under given circumstances, and without this amount of 
understanding the reciprocity, which is the vital principle of 
society, disappears. 


6. How custom grows and how it is related to individual 
character may in a general way be understood by considering 
how the process goes on amongst ourselves. Consider for a 


1 It implies all the growth that is involved in the formation of general 
rules of conduct as opposed to memories or anticipation of particular 
events, and on the moral side the growth of will as opposed to desire, 
and the formation of objects of permanent interest —relatively stable 
sources of happiness—as opposed to objects of temporary pleasure. By 
desire we are to understand impulse informed by the anticipation of an 
event. By will, a reaction of character to ends in which a relatively stable 
and permanent satisfaction is found. Its authority over desire we call 
self-control, but it is rather control by the self as a whole of one or other 
of the impulses which conflict with its permanent tendency. It is only 
when this relatively stable and balanced adoption of permanent ends or 
abiding principles is psychologically possible that the inculeation of general 
rules could have any meaning. 





ETHICAL EVOLUTION 13 


moment the judgments that we pass on our neighbours or on 
public men, and see how they are formed and how they operate. 
Many, indeed it is to be feared by far the larger portion, are 
made parrot fashion by the application of the first rough-and- 
ready rule, the simplest and shortest formula that leaps to our 
lips. We approve and condemn—generally condemn—in the 
patter of the tram-car or the railway carriage, fitting on modes 
of judgment that are flying about from mouth to mouth and 
scarcely obtain a lodgment in the brain. In these cases we are 
at best accepting and passing on what we find ready made for 
us by society. But how did it come to be made, since society 
is, after all, ourselves and those, not so greatly differing from us, 
who went before? ‘This points us to a deeper, more original 
source of the moral judgment, and this, in fact, we find in our- 
selves in that smaller number of cases in which the subject of 
discussion stirs some impulse within us, touches some spring of 
our own nature, moves some hidden sympathy or antipathy that 
dissipates the patter of the street and speaks out for itself. 
Whenever this happens we ourselves originate a moral judgment, 
and we do not need to be told that this judgment has its imme- 
diate source in some feature of our own character, our sense 
of justice, our love of our country, our hatred of meanness or 
cruelty, or whatever it may be. According as one or another of 
these elements is strong in us, so do we become, as it were, 
centres from which judgments of one kind or another radiate, 
from which they pass forth to fill the atmosphere of opinion, and 
take their place among the influences that mould the judgments 
of other men. For no sooner has the judgment escaped us—a 
winged word from our own lips—than it impinges on the judg- 
ment similiarly flying forth to do its work from our next-door 
neighbour, and if the subject is an exciting one the air is soon 
full of the winged forces clashing, deflecting or reinforcing one 
another as the case may be, and generally settling down towards 
some preponderating opinion which is society’s judgment on the 
case. But in the course of the conflict many of the original 
“judgments are modified. Discussion, further consideration, 
above all, the mere influence of our neighbour’s opinion re-acts 
on each of us, with a stress that is proportioned to various mental 
and moral characteristics of our own, our clearness of vision, 
our firmness or, perhaps, obstinacy of character, our self-con- 
fidence, and so forth. Thus, the controversy will tend to leave 
its mark, small or great, on those who took part in it. It will 
tend to modify their modes of judgment, confirming one, perhaps, 
in his former ways, shaking the confidence of another, opening 


14 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


the eyes of a third. Similarly, it will tend to set a precedent for 
future judgments. It will affect what men say and think on 
the next question that turns up. It adds its weight, of one grain 
it may be, to some force that is turning the scale of opinion and 
preparing society for some new departure. In any case, we 
have here in miniature at work every day before our eyes the 
essential process by which moral judgments arise and grow. 
Here we have the individual with his spontaneous utterance 
springing from his own character, guided by what lights he has. 
‘Here again we have the clash of judgments so delivered, the. 
war of ideas, the resultant opinion of society, the consequent 
re-modelling of their first judgment in individuals, the growth 
in society of a certain way of looking at things, in short, of a 
‘tradition. Individual impulse and social tradition are thus the 
two poles between which we move. 

Deep as are the contrasts between modern society and primitive 
life, we have no reason to doubt that there, too, the same forces 
were at work. The process would be far slower, though in- 
finitely less mobile, and custom once formed far more set and 
crystallized. But the prime factors are the same. There is 
always the character of each individual as it has grown up under 
the conditions of heredity, with its sympathies and antipathies, 
its impulses social and selfish, its susceptibilities and feelings in. 
which the relations of human being to human being play so 
prominent a part, uttering itself in judgments which praise or 
condemn conduct, forming conceptions of good and bad, right 
and wrong, as things jump with its feelings or displease them. 

' There is always the influence of the society in which each man 
, is born, the interaction between mind and mind and the shaping 
| of individual opinions into a social standard, the modelling of 
( each new generation by the heavy hand of the past. 


7. That the moral standard of man is based on the character 
of man, though it sounds like a truism, is a principle which has 
been but little understood in modern ethics. It has generally 
been assumed that the alternative lay between resolving the 
moral code into something essentially non-moral, e.g. self-interest, 
or admitting an authoritative mode of judgment, intuitive or 
rational, the deliverance of which could admit of no further 
analysis. Even the admission that morality has an instinctive 
basis might seem to remove it from criticism, in view of the 
common conception of instinct as universal, infallible, and essen- 
tially non-rational. A juster conception of instinct as something 

\ which throughout the animal world is found to vary greatly in 


ETHICAL EVOLUTION 15 


individuals, to be quite fallible, often imperfect and capable from 
an early stage of employing elementary reasoning in its service, 
enables us to see the genesis of morality in a different light. The 
instinctive element in human morality is by no means an un- 
failing power implanted by nature in all men to distinguish 
right from wrong. It is a name for human character as it grows 
up under the conditions of heredity, and it is from this character, 
with all the faults and foibles along with the virtues thereof, that 
the moral judgment issues. Human morality is as blind and 
imperfect as man himself. 

With some writers the view has found favour that sympathy 
is the basis of morality and of society. There is an element of 
truth in this, but it is too simple a statement. First, it is not 
sympathy alone that draws men together. Men have need of 
each other, physical need, and also a moral need for which 
sympathy is too simple an expression. Men may be drawn 
together by hate, by the passions of pride, by the love of com- 
petition—by a thousand motives which are far from being purely 
sympathetic or wholly good. Even love and affection, though 
at their best they imply sympathy, are not as such the same 
thing—otherwise passionate love would not so often be selfish. 
Secondly, if we take the actual as opposed to the ideal codes of 
mankind pure sympathy is certainly not their sole basis. Itisa 
factor in them. They enjoin mutual support, mutual forbear- 
ance, they express in some degree the desire of the impartial on- 
looker to side with the man who is wronged. Yet in average 
morality there is a very strong dose of the opposite quality. The 
workaday rules of conduct belong to the morals of strife, of 
actual warfare it may be, or it may be of peaceful but not less 
deadly competition. In the mere apportionment of praise and 
blame the blame is apt to be by far the more interesting part of 
the matter and the exercise of censorship has made the very name 
of moralist one to flee from. ‘The rude mind thoroughly enjoyed 
the time when “ the villain had his flogging at the gangway and 
we cheered.’ To the more cultivated a moral flagellation is no 
less acceptable. (It is only the highest ethical thought which 
rises above the categories of praise and blame to the clear-eyed 
vision of humanity wherein to “judge ’’ men means merely to 
learn how to deal with them so that they may serve and not mar 
the common good.) 

Let us, then, understand that human morality from the first 
rests on the antagonisms as well as the sympathies, the corrup- 
‘tions and foibles as well as the excellences of human nature. It 
does not follow that it is a form of selfishness based on the 


| 


16 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


desire for reciprocal benefits. Such a genesis would be out of 
keeping not only with the content of morality itself, but with all 
that we know of the origin of instinct. Reciprocity undoubtedly 
has a weighty influence in the shaping of conduct. It tends to 
set the average standard. A upon the whole will be content to 
do for B what B has done for him, and moreover C will expect as 
much of A. If he does less he is mean, if more he is generous. 
In the absence of selfish motives, again, the standard is apt to 
run down. Men do not become dead to obligation, but they 
interpret it laxly,and in the absence of criticism give all the 
doubtful points in their own favour. Where there is no compul- 
sion to give anything, the donor of a penny may swear that he 
has done more than was required of him. Hence (incidentally) 
the importance in many matters of public ethics of substituting 
legal obligation for the good-will of individuals. The best men 
do their duty already of their own motion. True—but make 
what they do the law. The result is to raise the whole standard. 
The worst are worked up to it, the best find still better things 
to do. All this may prove that selfish considerations sway . 
mankind, but of the doctrine of self-interest as the primary and 
only genuine human motive, it is sufficient to say that it bears 
no relation to the facts of human nature, and implies an incorrect 
view of the origin of instinct. 


8. Instinct we saw arose under the conditions of animal life, 
and is therefore bound in the main to subserve and not to hinder 
the needs of the living animal. ‘There is an analogous condition 
limiting, and indirectly shaping, the moral judgment, for if the 
standard of conduct were so perversely formed as to favour 
actions tending to the dissolution of the social bond, it would in 
the end be self-destructive. The society which should habitu- 
ally favour such conduct would perish by its inherent vices, and 
thus, as Plato urges, the saying that there must be honour even 
among thieves expresses a very important truth. But the limit 
thus imposed is a very elastic one, and this factor by no means 
works so uniformly for good as might be supposed. To begin 
with, society’s shoulders are broad, and they can bear many a 
burden imposed by human perversity without breaking down. 
Many injurious customs may arise and flourish as long as they 
do not touch the social life in a vital spot. Secondly, the prin- 
ciple cuts both ways, as the example of the thieves itself suggests. 
If the thieves become too honourable they would give up thieving 
and their particular form of society would break down. This 
same consideration holds of all class morality. ‘The members of 


ETHICAL EVOLUTION 17 


a privileged class must, if they are to remain a privileged class, 
carefully resist the encroachment of wider conceptions of the 
public good. They must combat such conceptions not only in 
principle but in their detailed application. They must extirpate 
any mode of thought which they find rising among their mem- 
bers in which a dangerous implication may be detected. Or, 
failing to extirpate it, they must employ some of those methods 
of interpretation which long experience has proved useful in 
drawing the sting out of higher ethical truth. The study of 
these methods, however, is not our immediate purpose. All we 
have to remark is that, while the requirements of the social 
union are an underlying condition limiting the movement of 
the ethical consciousness, these requirements themselves vary 
according to the nature of each society, and while there are some 
changes which would destroy society altogether—as e.g. if a 
doctrine of universal celibacy were to prevail—there are others 
which would merely destroy the existing form of society by 
transmuting it into something different, perhaps worse, perhaps 
better. Historically, both the fundamental requirements of the 
social order and the more occasional requirements of a given 
stage in social evolution have deeply influenced ethical growth. 
But the influence is for the most part unconscious. Men feel 
in that dim fashion which is popularly called instinctive that a 
given change is pregnant with consequences that would deeply 
affect the social order, and without thinking the matter out, they 
are prejudiced for or against the change, according as they are 
dissatisfied or contented with things as they are. The bearings 
of any new judgment on the general framework of social life 
must therefore be set down as a most important factor in 
determining its acceptance or rejection, though the working of 
this factor may be obscure and indirect, and may indeed be 
fully accomplished without the deliberate agency of any single 
individual who has thought the whole matter out. 

But, in fact, as human intelligence expands, these under- 
lying conditions of ethical movements are no longer left to 
work out their effects slowly and indirectly in the sphere of 
the unconscious. On the contrary, the requirements of social 
welfare are deliberately taken into account in dealing with new 
questions, and even established customs and traditions are 
criticized in the light of experience. Here emerge some of 
the broad differences between primitive and more advanced 
societies. 

To Primitive Man custom, as such, is sacred. It is true that 
it often has some theory to back it. It may be that it was a 

c 


18 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


rule received from the heroes of old, or brought down graven on 
stone from Sinai, that its violation would, as the Australians 
hold, produce a variety of bodily ailments, or, as the ancient 
Babylonians held, expose the offender to the malevolence of 
witch or demon. But, in reality, the customary is sacred because 
it is customary, and Sophocles is nearer the true feeling of the 
ordinary mind when he makes Antigone declare that the moral 
law is sacred, “‘ because it is not of to-day or yesterday, but lives 
for ever, and none knows whence it sprang.” |To the primitive 
mind—and in all of us there is a good deal of the primitive—it 
is only the mysterious that is impressive, and custom would 
lose half its force if its origin and meaning could be rationally 
explained and logically justified. But thought does not remain 
permanently at this level. As we follow the ethical movement 
in its advance, we shall find more and more that the interest 
shifts from the tradition which men follow half mechanically to 
the deliberate attempt to re-organize conduct on the basis of 
some distinct theory of life. A religious movement, a new con- 
ception of God or the future life, a philosophical theory of man’s 
place.in nature, a fresh analysis of human society, shifts the 
basis and so affects the standard of conduct. At the same time, 
the converse truth must never be lost sight of. The existing 
structure of society, the character of physical environment, and 
the views current in his surroundings of the duties of man, 
insensibly affect the thought of the profoundest and most 
original prophet or thinker. Nowhere is the feat of escaping 
from one’s own shadow harder than in the world of ethical and 
religious thought. Thus, in ethics, custom and theory are in 
constant and close interaction, and our subject, the comparative 
study of ethics, must embrace them both. It would include, 
were it within one man’s power to treat it exhaustively, at the 
one extreme the quasi-instinctive judgment based on the un- 
thinking acceptance of tradition, at the other the profoundest 
theory of the thinker seeking a rational basis of conduct and an 
intelligible formula to express the end of life, and between these 
two the influences, rational and half rational, which are at work 
with increased assiduity as civilization advances, re-modelling 
custom and substituting deliberately-accepted principle, whether 
true, half true, or false, for blind tradition. The one thing 
common to both extremes and all the intermediate region, is 
that there are things that men approve and disapprove—con- 
duct, character, purposes, results—that they judge “ good “208 
“ bad.” The subject of ethics may therefore be defined in the 
broadest terms as the inquiry into the Conception of the Good, 


ETHICAL EVOLUTION 19 


and the business of comparative ethics is to determine the 
generic character and principal specific variations of this con- 
ception as actually held by men in different places at different 
times. Finally, it must inquire whether among these conceptions 
there is anything that can be called development. 


9. Thus the conception of the Good is the central point of 
ethics, and whatever belongs essentially to this conception we 
call ethical. Variations in the conception of the good, for in- 
stance, we call ethical variations; development in it, if such 
there be, ethical development. The essential conditions, such 
as human character, on which the conception depends, are the 

“ ethical ” factors in life. 

Now the conception of the Good is the logical foundation of 
every rule of action—that is, of the whole standard of conduct. 
But it is important to observe from the outset, as bearing on 
the limits of our inquiry, that the standard of conduct may be 
affected by causes which are not ethical in origin though they 
may come to have ethical consequences. On one and the same 
conception of the good, for example, the same conduct may be 
differently judged, merely because its results were once believed 
to be good, and are shown by a later experience to be other than 
was at first supposed. For example, a magical rite may be pre- 
scribed as a duty because it is believed to be efficacious in averting 
a calamity to one’s self, one’s family, one’s society, as the case 
may be. If the belief in magic disappears, the performance 
of the rite will cease to be obligatory, although there may be 
no change in the current conception of the duties to society, 
family or self. From this simple example we can understand 
that rules of conduct are affected by the general level of in- 
telligence and knowledge. The whole character of man’s out- 
look on the world, the degree in which he understands the forces 
which surround him, will naturally affect his behaviour in many 
directions. It may be said that this has nothing to do with 
ethics, but turns on the obvious distinction between means and 
ends. The end, which is what men really conceive as “ good,” 
is the same, only advancing knowledge alters their view as to 
the means of securing it. But the relationship is in reality far 
more intricate and subtle than this. Not merely the working 
rules of behaviour, but the actual conception of what is good or 
bad is profoundly influenced by the ideas current of man’s place 
in nature and of the forces which surround him, while conversely 
the conception of the good that he has formed influences man’s 
ideas about the world and the agencies which control it. What 


20 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


the gods ordain comes to be thought right, and so to influence 
character; while, again, if men come to see that what the gods 
have ordained is wrong, their conception of the gods is altered 
and a religious revolution is brought about. Here even the 
silence of the ethical consciousness is instructive. Ifa barbarous 
practice, such as human sacrifice, is tolerated as a part of religion, 
the mere fact that the moral sense does not rise in revolt against 
it is painful evidence of the stunted growth of that side of human 
nature. But though ethical conceptions thus influence and are 
influenced by the general condition of knowledge and the con- 
ception that man forms of the world in which he lives, we cannot 
say that ethical, intellectual and religious development are the 
same thing. Many advances in knowledge may be made without 
affecting the conception of the good in the smallest degree. 
Many religious conceptions have no bearing for good or evil 
upon ethics. It is best to regard these factors of develop- 
ment not as identical but as closely correlated. In particular, 
ethical and religious evolution are closely intertwined, and we 
shall have to trace the second in so far as it is essential to the 
first. 

Again, individual conduct may be determined not by a con- 
ception of the good but by the compulsion of law. Here there 
is at first sight another non-ethical influence, controlling be- 
haviour, but here, again, when we look further, we see that the 
relation is more intimate. Not only are laws founded upon 
some one’s conception of the good (though not always that of the 
subject who obeys the law), but law in turn affects the concep- 
tion of the good itself, and as with law so with changes of the 
social structure generally. Now such social changes take place 
for the most part without any planning or designing on the part 
of the society which experiences them. Just as the individual 
grows with no effort on his own part, and with only a very 
limited power of regulating his physical development, so society 
orows, changes, and it may be decays, in ways and from causes 
of which it is for the most part quite unaware. It is only in the 
later stages of culture that men begin to study systematically 
the nature of social forces and the conditions of growth, arrest 
and decay. No doubt the efforts of the teacher or the statesman 
to resist glaring evils or develop beneficent tendencies have 
their effect, and the part played by deliberate reform increases 


as culture develops. Yet the forces which move society and are — 
ever changing the mutual relations of its members are so vast - 


and so intricate that they still in great measure elude the grasp 


of the wisest minds, and, as every one knows, the reforms most — 


Se 


ETHICAL EVOLUTION 21 


deliberately planned and most carefully thought out have a 
hundred unexpected reactions over and above the direct effect 
which they were designed to produce. Now these slow and 
silent changes of society are always modifying the ethical 
standard as expressed in the customs of society. Purely 
economic changes, for example, will tend to raise one class and 
depress another. A community in which comparative equality 
has reigned may give way to one divided between rich and 
poor, and from such a division some form of class morality is 
almost certain to arise. That is to say, the difference in social 
power will be represented by a differentiation in the social code 
between the behaviour due to a member of the more powerful 
class and that due to “ inferiors.’”’ Such causes as the accumula- 
tion of capital and the rise of large urban markets have at times 
made slave labour especially profitable, and slavery has accord- 
ingly received a great extension, while the class of free citizens 
has declined. In such cases the society affected appears to the 
on-looker to have undergone a distinct moral deterioration. So 
perhaps it has, but it is important to observe that the origin of 
the decline is not moral but economic. The true account of the 
change in most of these cases is probably that a lowered sense 
of the value of human life or a degradation of the ideal of citizen- 
ship has come about from the rise or extension of slavery, not 
that slavery has come about from a lowered sense of the value 
of human life. For what we call practical purposes, which too 
often mean simply for unscientific purposes, the distinction may 
seem unimportant. But let us look a little further. We have 
assumed a case in which the deterioration proceeds unchecked. 
Suppose, instead, that it awakes a protest, as among the Hebrews 
the sharpening contrasts of wealth and poverty awoke the 
prophets. Suppose the protest successful and the deterioration 
arrested. Here a distinctly ethical ideal, a judgment of right 
and wrong, an expression of character, has prevailed, and, 
instead of being passively shaped by the social tendencies, has 
subdued the social tendencies to itself. How should we account 
for the difference between this case and the last? We should 
have to admit that though at the outset both communities held 
the same standard of social justice, yet they held it after a very 
different fashion. To one it was a principle, or at any rate was 
capable, when challenged, of becoming a principle. To the 
other it was a custom merely, due rather to the favour of 
circumstances than to the wisdom or moral qualities of the 
citizens—it was the innocence preserved only through the want 
of temptation. Thus it is not difficult to see that it may make 


22 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


a great difference, “‘ practical ’’ as well as scientific, whether 
a good custom owes its existence to social circumstances or to a 
deliberate acceptance of it as wise and right. 

Thus, sociological development is not the same thing as 
_ ethical development. Social growth may produce a set of 
institutions of a certain value which no brain created, no human 
being planned, and which even those who enjoy them do not 
sufficiently appreciate to maintain them against attack. This is 
the element of the unconscious in social life. On the other 
hand, changes may arise from the growth of character or of a 
reasoned conception of the good, and so far they are due to an 
ethical development. From the ethical point of view institu- 
tions depending on a certain degree of ethical advance are of 
much more value than precisely similar institutions reached by 
another road, and the difference is likely to emerge in their 
subsequent history. For as the non-ethical changes of society 
affect the standard of conduct, so ethical ideas may in their 
turn re-act upon social organization. Such a re-action has made 
a large part of the history of the modern world, and analogies 
can be traced in ancient times, particularly when, as in the 
instance quoted among the Hebrews, a tenacious tribe adheres, 
amid the growth of civilization, to the ideals of a simpler life 
and a primitive social equality. | An interaction of this kind \ 
is the chemistry out of which come great explosions—social, 
religious and ethical.) 

Thus the whole mass of rules and regulations whereby 
humanity seeks to guide its life is, on the face of it, interesting 
to the inquirer into comparative ethics. These rules are not all 
necessarily ethical in origin, nor do all those which are recognized 
in any given society necessarily express the living character of 
human beings in that society at the moment. But as showing 
both what the ethical consciousness has done, and what it has 
failed to do, they are full of interest and significance for com- 
parative ethics. Social changes proceeding insensibly through 
the strengthening of forces in one direction, and their weakening 
in another, affect the moral standard for good or evil. Beliefs 
concerning the agencies underlying nature’s operations supply 
grounds good or bad for many judgments. These are the main 
forces which impinge on the conception of the good, shaping and 
shaped by it in accordance with the degree of intelligence with 
which it has been formed, and the firmness with which it is 
held. We shall accordingly have to deal not only with custom 
and law, but also with the principal forms of social organization 
on the one hand, and of religious thought upon the other. Only 


ETHICAL EVOLUTION 93 


with these before us shall we be in a position to trace the outline 
of ethical evolution. 

10. We have defined our subject as the study of ethical con- 
ceptions. It might be suggested that ethics should rather study 
the history of conduct itself. Such an inquiry, however, would 
be as unfruitful as it would be limitless. We may hope with 
very considerable difficulty to present a fair comparison of the 
different moral codes that have been accepted at sundry times 
and divers places. But to attempt to estimate how far the 
conduct of men has conformed to those codes would be quite 
another thing. There is no social measuring rod by which we 
could compare degrees of obedience to law. Civilized societies, 
with their records of criminal statistics, might, indeed, repay 
investigation from this point of view, though there is no depart- 
ment in which statistics are more apt to mislead, and that is 
saying a good deal. But if we were to take ruder societies into 
account, the means of investigation would wholly fail. All that 
we can hope to do in comparing different stages of growth is 
to deal with recognized customs, accepted maxims, and ideas 
expressed in mythology, in literature, or in art. In other words, 
we could only hope to give the history of those ethical concep- 
‘tions which are recognized as rules of conduct, and we must give 
up as wholly beyond our power the investigation of the degree 
in which conduct itself conforms to those rules. 

But this is not so much as to say that we are dealing with 
ideas only, and not with practice at all. In Ethics there are 
principles and principles, and the distinction between them is 
often clear enough. A rule of conduct may be a genuine ex- 
pression of what people actually feel and think, or it may be 
an ideal bearing as little relation to common practice as the 
Sermon on the Mount to the code of the Stock Exchange. In 
other words, there is a difference between the rule to which 
society expects you to conform and the rule which it keeps for 
Sunday use only. Both are rules and both may be brokent 
Hence to record either of them is to record not what conduct 
always i is, but what it is thought it ought to be. But there is 
this immense difference: that one rule has behind it the forces | 
of society, and so becomes in fact the normal conduct of the 
average man, while the other rests on the teaching of the idealist _ 
and is perhaps practised only by the best men in their best | 
moments. This broad distinction we must keep in mind, if 
we would not immensely over-rate the morals of the civilized 
world, which; unlike the savage and barbarian world, has almost ; 


24 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


invariably a double code, one for use and the other—as a cynic 
would say—for ornament. 

Indeed, the modern European has not one or two, but many 
codes claiming his allegiance—the code of religion, the code of 
honour, the code of his profession, perhaps the code of his class, 
and it may be the theories and ideals which he has imbibed 
from his own favourite teachers. All these codes may, and not 
infrequently do, conflict. The comparative student has no baro- 
meter to measure adequately their relative efficacy. All he can 
do is to apply his broad test and ask whether they are or are 
not working codes, 7.e. rules expressing the average conduct 
which society expects and enforces, or rules which it is safer to 
disregard than to deny. But it by no means follows that when 
he has applied the test he may proceed to leave the highest 
ideals, ‘‘ the high which proved too high, the heroic for earth too 
hard,” altogether out of his account. That men have held these 
views is a fact of great significance for ethical science. It is 
also a fact of scarcely less significance, that society which cannot 
practise them is yet forced to do lip-service to them. The 


historian’s point of view is here quite opposed to the cynic’s. 


‘Tf, indeed, we were to look at the conduct of modern society in 


| 


some relations, and in those relations only, we should be apt to 
say that it cloaked under fine words actions not less savage than 
those of our rude and barbarous ancestors. But let us be quite 
fair to ourselves, and admit that the necessity which we feel for 
clothing base actions in the language of high principles is, after 
all, a proof that those principles have begun to germinate and 
take root. The Assyrian king surveys with complacency the 
number of prisoners he has flayed, impaled, or burnt, and takes 
it all as a proof of the special goodness of Ashur to him and his 
house. We could hardly do the thing so baldly. The white man 
has no doubt committed great barbarities upon the savage, but 
he does not like to speak of them, and when necessity compels 
a reference he has always something to say of manifest destiny, 
the advance of civilization, and the duty of shouldering the 
white man’s burden, in which he pays his tribute to a higher 
ethical conscience. It may be said that the amalgam is a degree 
more detestable, and that Sargon or Assur-Natsir-Pal had at 
least the merit of frankness. But this would be historically 
false. ‘There was not the smallest merit in the Assyrian king’s 
frankness, because he saw nothing to be ashamed of. The white 
man’s hypocrisy is more revolting in itself, but, historically con- 
sidered, is a hint of better things. The ethical conception has 
a eertain value in itself, and the fact that it commands even a 


ETHICAL EVOLUTION 25 


theoretical allegiance is not without its encouraging side. What 
men already know to be true will ‘‘go near to be thought 
shortly.”’/ 

Our subject, then, must include the ideal of the apostle as well 
as the working rule of the lawyer. Its lower limit is the 
traditional custom followed by the half-unconscious savage. 
Its upper limit is the philosopher’s reasoned and rounded theory 
of life. Between these extremes all the judgments that men 
form about conduct fall within its scope. Only we must bear 
in mind that there are maxims and laws which state what 
average men do, and expect others to do, and there are maxims 
which lay down what, on the basis of some ideal doctrine, they 
ought to do. Both alike belong to our subject, but of any given 
law we must know to which class it belongs, and so far as this 
distinction carries us—but only so far—we are dealing not 
merely with ethical conceptions but also with the facts of human 
conduct. 


11. So far for the limits of our subject. A word must now 
be said as to methods. The nature of the evidence at the dis- 
posal of the historian of Ethics is fragmentary, and often most 
unsatisfactory. The difficulty is at its height in relation to 
primitive and savage tribes. Our object is to deal with ethical 
evolution, and to do this in fulness we should naturally desire 
to have a continuous ethical history of mankind throughout the 
ages. This, of course, is not available, and the anthropologist 
seeks to eke out the gaps in his knowledge of the past by com- 
parison with the present, the assumption being that in the 
existing savage and barbarous tribes we have survivals of the 
state of things common to the ancestors of civilized man. How 
far that assumption holds good it is not possible to say with 
certainty. It is well to remember that a contemporary savage 
has been the subject of an evolution neither longer nor shorter 
than that which our own race has gone through. Although the 
rate of change has been presumably slower, it is not certain that 
there has been no change at all. But without being hyper- 
critical upon this point, and admitting that by comparison 
between what we know of the contemporary savage and 
what we know of the ancestors of civilization we get the 
most probable view attainable of the earlier epochs of man- 
kind, we have still to deplore the fact that our information 
about the contemporary savage is itself in a fragmentary, 
obscure, and sometimes contradictory condition. These defects 
arise in part from difficulties which are readily intelligible in 


26 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


obtaining accurate information from people speaking a foreign 
language as to modes of life differing greatly from any of those 
with which the observer is familiar. There are, however, 
certain special difficulties in the use of the material, arising 
from the nature of ethical evolution, which deserve mention 
here. 

When we compare very different stages of culture we are apt 
to find a bewildering mixture of sameness and difference. We 
find some tribe like the Dyaks of Borneo with whom the 
traveller tells us it is a delight to dwell, so courteous are they, 
SO hospitable, so full of brotherly kindliness. We begin to 
think there is truth in the idyllic picture of savage life so popular 
in the days of our great-grandfathers, until we stumble upon 
the fact that these same Dyaks are inveterate head-hunters, 
and make a practice of murdering not men only, but women 
and children in satisfaction of the duty of blood-vengeance, and 
to obtain the magic virtues inherent in an enemy’s skull! At 
once the demon picture takes the place of the angel, and the savage 
world is seen as a Gehenna rather than a Paradise. We forget 
the inconsistencies of our own civilized codes, and can hardly 
believe that men capable of acts so fiendish can have any trace 
of genuine humanity about them. The fairer view about 
them is that the Dyaks have a morality of their own, for many 
purposes as good as ours, but limited by the conditions of their 
life and coloured by their ideas of the supernatural. To be 
judged fairly, in short, both their virtues and their vices must 
be taken in connection with their life as a whole. What are 
at first sight the same ideas, the same institutions, are in reality 
of different value and meaning in different surroundings, and 
this possible source of error must always be allowed for in drawing 
comparisons. 

In particular we must guard against misunderstandings arising 
from the obscurity, the inarticulateness, of primitive thought. 
Ideas quite familiar to us are often unintelligible to the savage, 
and for the words which we use to express them no precise 
equivalent can be found in his language, but it is a mistake to 
infer at once that nothing corresponding to our idea exists in 
the savage mind. If we look at his actions we may find reason 
to think differently. He acts as though he had the idea, and 
yet, it may be, he can give no intelligible account of it. Hence 
at one moment we are tempted to assert that he holds the idea 
just as we hold it, at another we begin to deny that he holds it 
at all. Now this is a difficulty which we find all along the line 


1 See Ratzel, History of Mankind, i. 448. 


ETHICAL EVOLUTION 27 


in the study of mental evolution. It is felt even more acutely 
in animal psychology. Here we are constantly tempted to 
believe that an animal is guided by clear ideas, while the evidence 
when all put together goes to prove that it is moving towards 
an end without clearly and fully apprehending what that end 
is. And when we have once grasped the possibility of this 
pseudo-purposive action, we are tempted to generalize it and 
deny intelligent purpose in all cases. As in animals, so at 
a higher remove in man, the primitive mind is guided by feel- 
ings, by impulses, by necessities, which it can but vaguely 
understand or formulate. Under their influence it builds up 
customs which to the inquirer seem logically to imply certain 
ideas and rules of conduct, but the savage himself, when tested, 
fails to understand these ideas. He practises them, yet to the 
bewilderment of the observer, he knows not what they are. 
This difference between rude and developed thought has an 
important application to Ethics. For example, statements are 
sometimes met with that this or that tribe is destitute of any 
conception of the distinction between right and wrong, and such 
statements are made by men who by experience should be well 
qualified to speak. Allegations of this kind arise, I think, from 
the kind of confusion just mentioned. It may be difficult or 
impossible to bring a savage to understand the meanings of the 
terms which we use to express right or wrong, virtue or vice, 
good or evil. Indeed, if we take highly civilized races at 
different periods from our own, we find a certain difficulty in 
fitting their ethical terms to ours. There is no word in Plato 
or Aristotle by which we could translate the English term 
“‘ duty,” for instance, but it would be an extremely unfair and 
unwarranted inference that the Greeks of Plato’s or Aristotle’s 
time were destitute of the sense of duty in practice. Aristotle 
has no word to use corresponding to our term “rights” and 
the Roman “jura,’’ but he desiderates such a word, showing 
thereby how far eee be! thought may outrun language. 
When we come to the savage’'we can well understand that even 
the simplest ethical conceptions may be beyond his power to 
grasp as ethical conceptions, but it does not follow that he is 
without a practical sense of right and wrong. In point of fact, 
although very few generalizations indeed may be hazarded in 
the whole of our subject, we were, I think, justified in assuming 
above that no society can maintain itself, unless. certain _lines..of 
conduct. are laid down..as_binding by. prevailing custom. If 
men are to live together at all they must know what they may 
expect and what is expected of them under given conditions. 


28 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


The merest game cannot be carried on without some degree of 
mutual understanding, still less the more complicated business 
of social life. We shall meet a little later with certain primitive 
tribes, which are to all appearance wholly destitute of any 
regularly established means of maintaining order or enforcing 
penalties. But even in these tribes there is nevertheless a 
certain body of custom, and something corresponding to what 
we should call “ public opinion’ tending to enforce these cus- 
toms. For example, the sentiment of the neighbours or of 
the tribe backs a man who avenges a murder and frowns upon 
a breach of the marriage laws. It is probably true, as a general- 
ization, that there is no existing tribe without some belief in 
“eae powers, but it is, I think, a more certain generalization 
‘that there is no existing tribe without rules of conduct backed 
{by the general approval of the community. 

We may, I think, go a step further, and say that, generally 
speaking, the effect of these rules is to extend a certain measure 
of protection to what we ourselves regard as the fundamental 
rights both of person and property, to encourage mutual aid 
and maintain something of a social life. In these broad outlines 
ethical principles do not greatly vary. Indeed, the comparative 
study of Ethics, which is apt in its earlier stages to impress the 
student with a bewildering sense of the diversity of moral judg- 
ments, ends rather by impressing him with a more fundamental 
and far-reaching uniformity. Through the greatest extent of 
time and space over which we have records, we find a recurrence 
of the common features of ordinary morality which, to my 
mind at least, is not less impressive than the variations which 
also appear. Some of the earliest funeral inscriptions in exist- 
ence might well bear comparison with those eulogies which 
were popular a generation or two ago among ourselves. Thus 
upon some of the Memphite tombs of the earliest Egyptian 
dynasties, we find it recorded that the deceased had been “ the 
friend of his father, beloved of his mother, sweet to those who 
lived with him, gracious to his brethren, loved of his servants, 
and that he had never sought wrongful quarrel with any man; 
briefly, that he spoke and did that which was right here below.”’ 
Let us hope that it was so. At any rate the pious record of the 
dead man’s relations testifies to the virtues which they considered 
it appropriate to mention. 

Again, if from remote but civilized antiquity we pass to 
contemporary savage races, we find observers praising, sometimes, 
no doubt, with undue partiality, those fundamental qualities 
without which society hardly holds together. Of the North 


ETHICAL EVOLUTION TiO 


American Indians, for example, so experienced an observer as 
Catlin was able to write, “‘It would be untrue, and doing an 
injustice to the Indians, to say they were in the least behind 
us in conjugal, in filial, or in paternal affection.’’1 Other writers 
in this case no doubt give less favourable judgments, and we 
must allow something for individual bias, but when all is said 
and done, we can hardly deny to any race of men or any period 
of time the possession of the primary characteristics out of 
which the most advanced moral code is constructed. Nor is 
primitive morality merely negative morality. Primitive man 
is free in giving, ready to share the little he has with his friend 
and neighbour, while of hospitality he makes a superstition. 
The duty of charity in the sense of sharing one’s goods with 
others is in no sense pre-eminently a modern or a civilized 
virtue. 

Yet with this identity there is a far-reaching difference not 
only in the actual rules of conduct, but in the way in which 
those rules are understood and applied, their mental framework, 
the basis of thought on which they repose. We have spoken of 
the protection given in primitive custom to rights of person and 
property. But we must understand that.in primitive thought 
these are not regarded as “rights” in our sense of the term. 
They do not hold unconditionally, nor is it necessarily “‘ wrong ” 
to violate them. But there are conditions, to our thinking 
perhaps quite irrelevant conditions, under which they are 
generally respected, and the neighbours will sympathize with, 
and perhaps actively support, an injured man who is avenging 
their violation. Take, as an illustration, the case of property. 
In many peoples it is honourable to steal, but not honourable 
to steal from a guest. We all know the story of “ the divine 
Autolycus ’’ in Homer, who excelled all men in thieving and 
false swearing, an excellence which, as the bard is careful to 
relate, was conferred upon him by the special grace of Hermes. 
But I have no doubt that Autolycus’ thieving and false swearing 
were all in accordance with rule. Probably he observed the 
oath when duly taken, and cheated under certain prescribed 
forms which would ayert the vengeance of the gods, and it was 
no doubt his Bal ce dellones that he knew those forms to 
a nicety. He was evidently a man in good repute, and was 
doubtless honourable to those to whom he considered himself 
tooweaduty. There are tribes to this day in which the robbing 
of a guest is prohibited as long as he remains in the house, but 
if, after speeding him upon his journey, you can catch him 

1 Catlin, i. 121. 


30 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


up in the field, his belongings are lawfully at your disposal. 
These instances may serve to illustrate some of the difficulties 
which confront the student of comparative Ethics. He meets 
with the familiar ideas of civilized morality in early ethics, 
but he recognizes them with difficulty; they are the same, 
yet not the same. The broad explanation is that he is dealing 
with the unfolding of a germ, and not with an accretion of new 
elements. 

If, that is to say, there is ethical progress (and whether there 
is such is, after all, our main question), it is to be found, not in 
the development of new instincts or impulses of mankind or in 
the disappearance of instincts that are old and bad, but rather 
in the rationalization of the moral code which, as society ad- 
vances, becomes more clearly thought out and more consistently 
and comprehensively applied. For as mental evolution advances, 
the spiritual consciousness deepens, and the ethical order is 
purged of inconsistencies and extended in scope. The deity, 
who is at first much less than a man, becomes progressively 
human and then, in the true sense of the word, superhuman. 
Blind adherence to custom is modified by an intelligent per- 
ception of the welfare of society, and moral obligation is set 
upon a rational basis. These changes re-act upon the actual 
contents of the moral law itself, what is just and good in custom 
being sifted out from what is indifferent or bad, and the purified 
moral code re-acts in turn on the legislation by which more 
advanced societies re-model their structure. The psychological 
equipment of human beings on the one side and the actual 
needs of social life on the other are the underlying factors 
determining rules of conduct from the lowest stage upwards, 
but it is only at the highest grade of reflection that their opera- 
tion enters fully into consciousness so that the mind can under- 
stand the grounds and value of the laws which it has itself 
laid down. The true meaning of ethical obligations—their 
bearing on human purposes, their function in social life—only 
emerges by slow degrees. The on-looker, investigating a primi- 
tive custom, can see that moral elements have helped to build 
it up, so that it embodies something of moral truth. Yet 
these elements of moral truth were perhaps never present to 
the minds of those who built it. Instead thereof we are likely 
to find some obscure reference to magic or to the world of spirits. 
The custom which we can see, perhaps, to be excellently devised 
in the interests of social order or for the promotion of mutual 
aid is by those who practise it based on some taboo, or preserved 
from violation from fear of the resentment of somebody’s ghost. 


ETHICAL EVOLUTION 31 


The ghost or the taboo in that case is in a sense the form which 
moral obligation takes at a certain stage. It supplies the 
savage with a theory of the moral basis, an explanation of cus- 
tom and a sanction. How far it really determines custom, or 
how far it arises as it were ex post facto to justify modes of con- 
duct to which the savage feels himself impelled without know- 
ing why, are questions of extreme intricacy, and the answer 
would probably be different in different cases. At this stage 
it may suffice to remark that in order to understand ethical 
development, we must not only know what men are bidden to 
do by law and custom at each stage, but also the reasons which 
they themselves assign for doing it. We must investigate the 
basis as well as the standard of morals. It will be convenient 
to take the standard first, to trace the actual rules of conduct 
laid down by different peoples at different stages of culture, 
and proceed from the practice to the theories of conduct. When 
both aspects of development are before us, we may hope to form 
a just if an imperfect conception of ethical evolution. 


12. If our data are to throw any light on this evolution, it 
must be through the adoption of some methods of classification 
distinguishing the more from the less undeveloped ethical 
conceptions. But here we touch our greatest difficulty. Moral 
progress (to assume provisionally that it is a reality) does not 
proceed continuously in a straight line. It does not affect all 
branches of the moral law simultaneously, nor does it advance 
step by step with the growth of civilization. Even if it be 
true—and it has yet to be proved—that the highest civilization 
possesses the highest ethical code, it is certainly not true of 
every intervening stage in the growth of civilization that it 
witnesses a corresponding moral advance. On the contrary, 
as has been already hinted, the very conditions of the develop- 
ment of society have in some cases been hostile to moral develop- 
ment for the time being. An advance in the arts of life may 
well work retrogression in the ethical sphere. Were we to take 
some of the tests which are often put forward as the special 
characteristics of civilized morality, we should be surprised to 
find how often a ruder society comes well out of the comparison 
when measured against one that is more advanced. Take, for 
example, the position of women. We are often told that this 
is a true test of civilized morality, yet in point of fact it would 

be by no means true to allege that the status of woman varies 
in all cases directly as the civilization of the society to which 
she belongs. In the English law of Blackstone’s day, for ex- 


32 MORALS IN EVOLUTION | 


ample, a married woman can scarcely be said to have had a 
legal personality, so great is the number of her disqualifications 
as to the holding of property, as to capacity to give evidence, 
as to the custody of her children, even as to her legal responsi- 
bility for crimes; and many of these disqualifications lasted 
on down to the present generation. If we turn to the oldest 
code of laws in the world, the recently-discovered laws of Ham- 
murabi, we shall find that few of these disqualifications applied 
to married women in Babylonia some 2000 years before Christ ; 
yet it would be unfair to infer that the civilization of England 
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was on the whole 
inferior to that of Babylonia in the third millennium before 
Christ. Among many tribes of the lowest savagery, the position 
of women is relatively good, while there are many more advanced 
peoples in which their position is little better than that of slaves. 
Slavery itself, the most direct denial of those elementary rights 
which form the central point of civilized ethics, is an institution 
which scarcely begins to flourish except with the rudiments of 
civilization. In the simplest groups even distinctions of rank 
vanish, and there is often no authority beyond the personal 
influence of older and abler men. With civilization the scale of 
human action grows, and there arise inequalities which often place 
entire classes or populations at the mercy of others, and this 
mercy is not always found. Hence civilization knows of oppres- 
sions and even horrors from which primeval life is relatively 
free.} 

The study of moral advancement, therefore, is no tracing out 
of a single straight line, but rather the following of a very wind- 
ing curve. But even that does not express the full difficulty 
for the student, for it is no simple or single curve that we have 
to follow. We have not to deal with one development only, 
but with many; nor with a uniform evolution, but with a 
luxuriant diversity; not even with evolution alone, but with 
dissolution and decay as well. 

How, then, are we to arrange our data? In the first place, we 


1 In earlier editions I accepted the judgment of Mr. E. J. Payne (History 
of the New World called America, ii. 344): ‘‘ We follow with a sense of 
shame and horror man’s advance through the middle and higher barbarism 
to the threshold of civilization, looking back almost with regret to the 
period of savagery when human progress exhibited a comparatively mild 
and beneficent aspect.’’ But on a fuller review of the facts I think this 
an exaggeration. Though some of the simplest peoples, like the Punans 
or the Veddas, are of mild and gentle type, there are many others in whom 
the worst evils are conspicuous, only, for reasons pointed out in the text, 
on a smaller scale, and the more ordered life of advancing civilization has 
its compensating points, even for the oppressed. 


ETHICAL EVOLUTION 33 


must try to analyze and classify the conceptions or institutions 
which we find. For example, we can take the multitudinous 
forms of the marriage tie and we can show that there are certain 
types about which those various forms group themselves, as 
though radiating from so many distinct centres. And so with 
other institutions. There are distinct types by describing which 
we can mark out the main lines of classification. Actual insti- 
tutions conform to these types in varying degree, and the 
gradations, when completely filled in, form a chain connecting 
one type with another. This sort of classification is the first 
step. 

But how are we to proceed from morphology to development, 
from the forms which we find to the history and causes of their 
growth and decay? Ethical evolution is not self-dependent but 
is intertwined with the entire movement of society. To under- 
stand it we must examine its correlation with other elements of 
the social structure, but it may as well be said at the outset that 
the cases in which we can say universally that a certain institu- 
tion belongs to a certain stage of social culture are very rare. 
On the other hand, we shall find that certain types of institutions 
do predominate at successive stages, while above and below that 
stage they grow rarer till they finally disappear. What is meant 
will perhaps be best explained by an example. The permission 
of polygamy is a general characteristic of races which fall below 
the standard of European civilization. In such races the custom 
that allows it is predominant over the custom which forbids it. 
Yet of such races there are many in which polygamy israre. There 
are some in which it is replaced by polyandry. There are not a few 
which are monogamous. There are some, and these some of the 
lowest, in which monogamy is as strict and binding as in Catholic 
Europe. Nevertheless throughout savagery, barbarism and 
semi-civilization, the permission of polygamy is the ordinary 
rule, while in the higher civilization monogamy is the rule. In 
this limited and restricted sense it is true, after all exceptions 
are allowed for, to say that the tendency of the lower culture is 
to allow, and of the higher to prohibit, the plurality of wives. 
We may carry the matter a step further and say that polygamy 
is the special characteristic of peoples above the lowest and 
below the highest levels of civilization, for though it occurs 
among lower savages it does not reach so extreme a development. 
Now this predominance of given types of institutions at given 
levels of general culture has its significance. The forces econo- 
mic, ethical, social, intellectual, which tend to shape any in- 
_ stitution are multitudinous. Some pull in one direction, others 
D 


34 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


the contrary way. In such cases we seldom obtain generaliza- 
tions which hold without exception. The matter is like any 
other which comes under the general Law of Probabilities. 
There are typical cases representing the normal balance of forces, 
and round these as a centre radiate deviating cases where the 
ever varying forces have gathered strength in one direction or 
another. Further, if there is any influence at work which alters 
the distribution of forces, there may be several such centres 
corresponding to different degrees in the working out of that 
influence. This is what we shall find in ethical institutions. At 
successive stages of general culture certain types predominate 
without being universal; that is to say, the forces making for a 
given type are apparently favoured by the general conditions of 
one stage and depressed by those of another. 

But to study correlation effectively we need something more 
definite than the conception of general culture, which, indeed, 
strictly speaking, includes ethical development itself. We must 
find some element, not in itself ethical, occupying a leading place 
in social development, and enabling us by its changes to measure 
the distance which any given society has travelled from the 
primitive condition of man. To this end the collective stock 
of knowledge, the equipment of method and governing con- 
ceptions which constitute the working intellectual capital of 
any community will serve us best. Intellectual development in 
this form is the most conspicuous and most measurable feature 
of human evolution. For if the human race did in fact evolve 
from a lower type, it must have started at a zero point in this 
scale, and in the anthropological record we have on this side 
peoples whose equipment, though certainly not primitive, is 
exceedingly crude in shape and slender in amount, while from 
these upwards we have a rich development including every 
possible gradation. On this side again, development is un- 
ambiguous in meaning, definite in direction, and roughly measur- 
able in degree. It is always towards fuller, more accurate, and 
more systematic knowledge and understanding of the conditions 
affecting human life and its environment. It is measurable for 
all races by the control which it renders possible over these 
conditions,! and in its higher stages, in addition, by the written 
record of intellectual activity. It is not, indeed, continuous, for 
it has in historical times suffered periods of arrest and decay, 
but it is more nearly continuous than any other known movement 


of humanity, and it tends to more complete continuity and 


1 With certain limitations, which will be considered 1 in their place (see 4 


below, chap. ii. pp. 39 and 41). 


ETHICAL EVOLUTION 35 


greater speed. It is, in fact, a self-accelerating function. Now 
does this intellectual enlargement involve, upon the whole, a 
profounder ethical understanding, a larger scope of the moral 
will, a firmer grip on the purpose of life? If we could answer 
this question, we should have a key, not only to the historic 
movement of ethical conceptions but to the future evolution of 
the race, for man grows, and to all appearance will grow, more 
and more rapidly in power, but whether he will use that power for 
noble ends or, child-like, make of it a gigantic and dangerous 
toy, is unhappily not so certain. 

The relation between intellectual and moral advance is cer- 
tainly not simple or direct. In the first place, as already hinted, 
advance in industrial arts tends to breed social inequality, to 
complicate the social structure, and set problems which, even 
with the best will, the wisdom of man finds hard to solve. In the 
second place, the mere diversion of energy and interest to one 
side of human endeavour draws on the supply available for 
another. \When the best minds of antiquity were concentrated 
on the religious problem, knowledge and the arts fell into decay, 
and when the will and intellect revolted, they destroyed much 
that they are still seeking to re-build. We cannot think without 
rebelling, and in rebelling it is easier to undo than to re-make. 
Nevertheless, it is possible that the direction and the goal of the 
practical and theoretical reason are ultimately the same, and if 
so, though their paths often cross and their movements collide, 
we may find running through many strange kinks and quirks of 
reaction a certain broad parallelism of advance. To examine 
into these issues, we have to add to our classification of moral 
institutions and ideas, a classification of societies. ‘This classi- 
fication will yield us not a simple order in time, for intellectual 
advance is not uniform or continuous, and in the world of to- 
day all types except the very lowest are still represented, but 
an order of development. By development here we mean simply 
advance in the intellectual equipment of knowledge and method, 
and in the control of the conditions of life depending thereon ; 
and civilizations most advanced in this respect we shall call higher 
civilizations. The development tends to correspond to the time 
order, but the relation is not exact, for development takes time 
but time does not always bring development. Upon the whole, 
however, the advance becomes more certain as it proceeds, and 
the time order and development order on this side of human life 
are a converging series. 

Now our specific problem will be first to describe the types of 
ethical order and then to inquire into their correlation with this 


36 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


development. Behind these there is a third question. Suppose 
that we find a distinctive ethics of the higher civilizations, 
we have yet to ask whether this is the higher ethics. This is a 
question partly of fact but also partly of value, for, ethically, 
what is higher or lower? We are prone to take our own ethics 
as the highest, and so are provided with a very short and simple 
answer to the question, for in realized articulate knowledge, and 
consequently in control of material conditions, our civilization 
is the highest known, and its ethics are our own, and what more 
would you? But in reality our own ethics are riddled with 
inconsistencies, pretences, and absurdities, and a man who would 
judge whether they are on the balance better or worse than any 
other, must have an objective standard to guide him—that is, 
he must have a moral philosophy. It is not my purpose here to 
add a system of moral philosophy to a treatise sufficiently lengthy 
on the history of ethics, but I would emphasize at this point 
that the question of Values is quite distinct from the question 
of fact—the history of ethics quite distinct from its philosophy. 
Nevertheless, the real meaning of the history can only be appre- 
hended when we have determined the question of value; and, 
in point of fact, the position which people assign to the more 
distinctive ethical tendencies of our own period must differ 
radically according to the value which they put on this or that 
side of human conduct and social relations. I shall therefore en- 
deavour in its place to indicate in briefest outline the principles 
on which I believe the ultimate judgment of value—that is, the 
measure of right and wrong—to depend, and I shall apply this 
standard in estimating the actual moral codes of mankind. It 
is fair to remark, however, that it is also quite useful to apply 
our ordinary civilized codes to the judgment of simpler peoples, 
for one of our questions is how codes actually change, and in 
relation to this question the agreement or disagreement of any 
other code with that which, whether it be better or worse, belongs 
to the most developed society, is material to the appreciation of 
the course of ethical movement. 

We have, then, before us three problems. We have first to 
classify customs and ideas relating to conduct? Next, having 
classified societies in accordance with their intellectual develop- 
ment in the sense explained, we have to inquire into the relation 
between ethical thought and practice and this classification— 
that is, to discover what sort of ethical order belongs to the less 
and what to the more advanced societies. Lastly, we have to 
examine the moral types thus distinguished in the light of a © 
reasoned standard of value, in order to determine whether the 


ETHICAL EVOLUTION 37 


movement is towards the higher or the lower. No theory of 
moral development is complete which does not deal with all these 
as distinct but related questions. The limits of a single treatise, 
of course, imply that none of the three can here be set forth with 
the fulness which it deserves. I have, in fact, confined myself to 
those aspects of ethical development which appear most essential, 
and on the philosophical side to such indications of a view as will 
enable the reader to form a fair judgment of the method. 


bel 


CHAPTER II 
TYPES OF SOCIETY 


1. THE problem of classifying peoples in accordance with their 
intellectual equipment falls into two quite distinct parts. In 
the first place, we have the multitude of “ uncivilized ” peoples 


. known slightly from ancient authors but mainly from contem- 


porary or comparatively recent research. These peoples do 
not speak for themselves. They have no trustworthy recorded 
history because they have no writing, and for the same reason 
they have no documentary literature, science, theology, or philo- 
sophy. Nor do they even communicate their ideas orally to 
the white man with ease or accuracy. Our knowledge of them 
is, and must be in the main, an intellectual construction of 
our own. They are very numerous and present a bewildering 
variety of types curiously intermingled, marked differences 
being often presented by neighbouring peoples and _ baffling 
attempts at generalization. The “ civilized’ peoples, on the 
other hand, are, for purposes of investigation, the peoples who 
could write and therefore have a history. Often the history is 
long enough and full enough to enable us to trace outlines of their 
development in the actual record, instead of merely inferring it 
by the aid of comparisons and probabilities. Their individuality, 
therefore, is more marked, at least for us, than that of the simpler 
peoples, and the centres of civilization are few in number and 
can be referred to by name. Thus, to deal with the uncivilized 
peoples we need a classification which will enable us to handle 
them in groups; to deal with civilized peoples one that will 
rather be adapted to the distinction of phases in growth which a 
single people may pass through within the limits of our record. 
For the classification of the simpler peoples we require external 
marks which are easily verifiable, so that even superficial reports 
of them are not likely to mislead us. We can best find these 
in the nature and degree of the control over the environment 
evidenced by the industrial arts. These will not, indeed, afford 
a complete measure, for even among the simplest peoples some 
may have put more of their thought into religion or mythology, 
just as some have undoubtedly combined high artistic sensibility 
38 


“ 


——— 


a 


TYPES OF SOCIETY 39 


with great poverty in practical resources. But in the absence 
of writing it must be exceedingly difficult for any body of positive 
knowledge to be handed on, and without tradition no body of 
knowledge can grow, except in the form of traditional instruction 
in practical arts,1 and intellectual equipment in the sense defined 
in the last chapter was confined to the body of positive knowledge 
and the methods and governing conceptions by which it is 
organized, refined and applied. Still, the measure is but rough, 
and in applying it further allowances must be made. One people 
is confined to an arid region which has debarred it from the 
beginnings of agriculture, but it may have made a struggle with 
an untoward environment which should place it above another 
people more favourably situated and so, in externals, better 
equipped. Another people, again, may have acquired from 
neighbours arts which they could not invent, and on a surface 
view we may rate them too highly. These and similar considera- 
tions have to be kept in mind in placing any people, and any 
classification effected at present must only be regarded as a first 
approximation. 

The simplest method of approaching a classification is to 
begin with the method of obtaining food, and to correct and 
supplement it by attention to dwellings, clothing, implements, 
weapons, industry, trade and commerce.? With regard to food- 





_getting we have, first, the Hunters and Gatherers—people who 


live on the raw products of the earth, largely, especially in the 
lowest stage, by gathering fruits, berries, roots or acorns, but also, 
particularly in a slightly higher stage, by hunting and trapping 
wild animals, and by fishing. There is no agriculture, and in 
many cases no domestic animal but the dog, and in some cases— 
generally owing to contact with higher civilization—the horse, 
or, again, the reindeer. Peoples at this stage may be called 
Hunters, Fishers and Gatherers, or as a simple though not 
always quite appropriate title, Hunters. We have divided them 
into (a) Lower Hunters, who in general live largely by gathering, 


_ have no substantial dwellings, no spinning, weaving or pottery, 


"7 


and no domestic animals but the dog; and (b) Higher Hunters, 


‘who live more by hunting proper, or by fishing, and have some, 


1 The fine arts are not taken into account in this classification. It is 
clear that, though they certainly imply some command over matter and 
a body of traditional knowledge and skill, they depend on other and quite 
different factors from those which govern intellectual development in 
general. hee 

2 The method used is explained and the results given in detail in 
“Institutions of the Simpler Peoples,’ chap. i, by G. C. Wheeler, 
M. Ginsberg, and the present writer. 


X 


“y 


40 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


at least, of the arts mentioned. The highest of the class are the 
fishing peoples of the West Coast of America, who, in general 
culture, almost deserve to be in a class by themselves, along, 
perhaps, with one or two other tribes who have made substantial 
advances in general culture without altering their method of 
obtaining food. 

Agriculture, in its lowest stage, is combined with hunting and 
gathering. It accounts at first for but a fraction of the food 
supply and does not involve the abandonment of nomadic habits, 
because the ground is only tilled while its first fertility lasts, 
and after one or two crops are taken a new clearing is made for 
which, very possibly, a new encampment is required. From this 
we distinguish a second stage of agriculture, when it has become 
the regular and main source of supply, and from this again a 
third stage where, in addition to agriculture, other arts and 
industries are developed or trade begins to play a regular part 
in the supply of necessaries. Where we find the larger cattle 
kept, and oxen used in farming, we refer a people to this stage, 
and generally, in assigning a people to any one of these stages, 
we should take its dwellings, its handicrafts, and its commer- 
cial development into account as well as the condition of its 
agriculture alone. 

Pasture may be regarded partly as an alternative, partly as 
a supplement to agriculture. We distinguish a lower pastoral 
stage in which there is no agriculture, and a higher one in which 
agriculture generally exists, though in a subordinate place, and 
trade and the industrial arts are well developed. This stage may 
fairly be set on a level with the highest agricultural stage. 

A settled agricultural people, practising irrigation, using the 
plough, having draught oxen and other cattle, acquainted with 
iron or bronze, copper, and gold, having substantial houses of 
timber or sun-dried brick, spinning and weaving textiles, and 
making their own pottery, is in material culture sufficiently 
equipped for a simple civilization, and at the top of our highest 
classes would be peoples so equipped. Our classification there- 
fore extends from the lowest known savagery to the verge of 
civilization. But when we pass the boundary our methods need 
a change. The food supply can no longer be used, for all civi- 
lized peoples lived by a combination of agricultural and pastoral 
pursuits, or by an industry and commerce which enables them to 
buy the products of agriculture and pasture. No change either 
in the methods of tillage or trading, of sufficient magnitude to 
serve as a class distinction, could be pointed out until we come 
to the beginnings of scientific farming in the eighteenth century . 


LN 


TYPES OF SOCIETY 41 


Other arts might give more help. For example, the early 
Oriental civilizations used copper, and later bronze, but not 
iron.t The use of important artificial substances such as glass ? 
belongs to the maturity rather than the youth of these civiliza- 
tions, and the Egyptians gradually built up a fairly extensive 
empirical chemistry. Beyond these arts, if we except the 
compass, known to the Chinese from the second century B.c., 
the use of the arch in building, and the elaboration of some 
of the simpler machines in the art of war, we find relatively 
little advance in industrial appliances till we come to the first 
epoch of inventions in the Middle Ages. But in the meantime 
great advances had been made in other departments of thought 
and knowledge, which no useful classification could leave out of 
account. In fact, if we look to the early civilizations themselves, 
what marks them out as the beginners of historic_culture is not 
so much any new method of dealing with the material world, as 
the invention of writing, which at once facilitated the organiza- 
tion of regular government over an extended territory, and made 
it possible to record and hand on acquired knowledge outside the 
sphere of the traditional handicrafts. The use of writing is thus 
the best_rough-and-ready mark to distinguish civilized peoples 
as a class. With its aid the first Asiatic civilizations in Baby- 
Jonia, Egypt, and Ancient China built up the first elements of 
systematic knowledge, in arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, 
together with some fragmentary and empirical knowledge of 
chemistry and medicine. If we used a name, we may call this 
the stage of proto-science—of systematic knowledge in its 
germinal elements. But from the eighth to the fifth centuries 
B.c., higher phases of thought appear in many parts of the world. 
Men begin to reflect on ethics and government as in China, on 
religion and ethics as in Palestine, on ultimate problems of being 
as in India, and finally on the whole field of knowledge in Greece. 


1 In Egypt iron is found in Ist Dynasty tombs but does not seem to 
have come into general use till the seventh century (Myres, Dawn of 
History, p. 60). The Sumerians do not seem to have known iron (King, 
Sumer and Accad, p. 50) and to have used copper rather than bronze 
(2b., p. 72). In Crete, the introduction of metal is referred to 2800 B.c., 
of iron to 1200 s.c. (Hawes, Crete the Forerunner of Greece, p. 280). 

2 Glazed beads appear in prehistoric finds, but glass by itself not before 
the 18th Dynasty (Flinders Petrie, Enc. Brit., ‘Egypt,’ p. 73). 

8 They knew gold, silver, copper, iron and lead, and the alloys of copper 
with tin and,zinc, glass and glazed earthenware. They prepared silk, 
and had many dye-stuffs, and drugs for medicine and embalming (La Cour 
and Appel, Physik, ii. 325, 355). 

* The Alexandrian experiments with atmospheric pressure and with 
steam appear to have found little or no practical application until this 


period. 


42 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


What connecting channels there may have been to communicate 
this impulse, whether in reality it arose independently among 
different peoples, how far it was prepared by such gradual © 
development of religious speculation which we trace in Egypt 
during the second millennium B.c., we do not know accurately 
as yet. But we have clearly to do with a phase of thought of 
which the oldest civilizations present little or no evidence. It 
has become deliberate, systematic, definite, and in a measure — 
critical. In Greece criticism is applied to the foundations of 
thought itself, so that we have a philosophy, and the field 
of acquired knowledge is distributed into departments, each of 
which is systematically explored, so that we have true sciences. 
Finally, carried on by Arabic culture, Greek thought arrived in 
medieval Europe, and we have the modern development of 
philosophy and science. ‘The relation of each of these phases of 
thought to religion and ethics we shall consider briefly in their 
place. Here we may simply distinguish (1) the stage of in neipient 
learning in the ancient East; (2) the stage of reflection in the 
later East; (3) the critical thought of Greece, widely affecting 
subsequent culture; and (4) that of the modern world, which 
begins to take independent shape from about the sixteenth 
century—movements too rich in content to be aptly character- 
ized in abstract terms, and best identified by the peoples amon 1g 
whom, and the periods in which they flourished. 


{ 2. Intellectual development is not the product of one race, still 
te of one society alone. It is a tradition handed on with suc- 
cessive improvements from one. civilization to another, and that 
is why it shows a nearly continuous advance.) In the field of 
ethics tradition is not so potent, and it is less easy for one society 
to stand on the shoulders of another. In place of a continuous 
development, therefore, we have a succession of forms, of experi- 
ments in social life we might almost call them, which have their 
measure of success, and build up societies that endure for a longer 
or shorter time, but in the end give place to some fresh social 
type. Whether, on the whole, there is development on this side 
too, and, if so, whether it stands in any broad relation to intellec-— 
tual development, is a question which we must do our best to de- 
termine. But we must first consider the forms themselves, and 
we must begin by examining the general character of the social 
union. For the broadest distinction between different forms of 
human society turns on the nature of the social bond itself—the 
tie which keeps the members of a society together while separating 
them in a greater or less degree from the rest of the world. Not 


TYPES OF SOCIETY 43 


that the bond of union is ever simple or single. The motives 
that make men live and act together are diverse. But among 
the conditions which keep society at one and maintain its con- 
stitution in vigour certain leading forces may be distinguished, 
and at different stages of development one or other of these is 
often so prominent as to dominate the remainder and give its 
character to the society as a whole. These forces may, I think, 
be usefully grouped into three which, we may say, constitute the 
leading principles of social union. I will call them— 

(A) The principle of Kinship. 

(B) The principle of Authority. 

(C) The principle of Citizenship. 

It might be expected that I should add religion as a fourth, 
but it is better to say that the religious factor works all along the 
line, strengthening each of these three in turn with its authority, 
though there are some cases in which it becomes so dominant 
as to give a special character to the bond, and these must be noted 
in their place. 

(A) Kinship, as a bond of Social Union. 

Be Now primitive and savage society appears to rest generally on 
kinship. Thus, the one form of social union which may with 
entire confidence be called natural and universal is the relation- 
ship of mother and child. But as the children grow up they will 
want partners in their turn, and by an impulse which rarely if 
ever fails altogether in any society, will seek them outside the 
circle of their own parents, brothers or sisters. The simplest 
social organization, therefore, postulates two or more families 
living together, but constantly united by cross ties of inter- 
marriage. It may be in such a society that a practice and even 
a binding custom arise, that a youth is given his mother’s brother’s 
daughter in marriage, while her brother, perhaps, takes his sister 
in exchange. If so, or if the group is simply endogamous,? it 
is likely to remain compact and exclusive, and, indeed, some 
societies seem hardly to advance beyond this stage. A handful 
of families, which must in turn be united by countless ramifica- 
tions of intermarriage, occupy in common a tract of jungle or 
bush, now camping together, now separating as the need of food 
determines. Their whole numbers will not amount to more 
than ten or a dozen families, perhaps not to more than three or 

1 With the Veddas marriage is either with the mother’s brother’s 
daughter or father’s sister’s daughter—probably the former by preference 
(Seiigmann, The Veddas, p. 65). The statement of older authorities 
quoted in the first edition of this work, that Veddas married their sisters, 


was an error arising from a linguistic confusion. 
2 As the wild Kubu (Hagen, p. 130) and Semang (Martin, p. 863). 


44, MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


four, including from twenty to sixty individuals. In such a 
Gross-familie, enlarged family or kindred group, whatever govern- 
mental authority there is fuses itself with the domestic authority 
of the elders, and must depend largely on their personal qualities, 
though it may be that, whether for his personal prowess or by 
some rule of succession, some one man is pre-eminent among 
them. There is here neither government nor law in the sense of 
an impersonal system capable of over-riding the ties of kinship, 
for the ties of kinship are society.? 

But such isolation is exceptional. Under ordinary conditions 
the little community will be in contact with others, while even if 
it enters unoccupied territory, it would, if it were fruitful and 
multiplied, soon extend beyond the limits of the enlarged family. 
In the latter case relations are maintained, and in the former 
may be instituted by intermarriage. Suppose two such groups 
as we have described to come into contact with one another, and 
suppose the young men of the one to find the maidens of the other 
fair; it is possible that, sooner or later, they will get over the 
antipathy of their elders, if such there be, to departure from the 
practice of marriage within the group. The groups will inter- 
marry and so form a larger and looser unity. But the very first 
marriage is likely, if acknowledged, to fix the status of the woman 
of the new group and her family. Very likely her brother will 
take a sister of her suitor in exchange, and her family will occupy 
towards that of her husband the same relation as any of the 
families of his own group with which he might previously marry. 
The new family, that is, will be ranked with a portion of the 
existing group for marriage purposes, and come under the 

1 Among the wild Semang, Martin (Die Inland-Stamme der Malayischen 
Halbinsel) says that the largest group known seems to have had six huts 
with twenty-seven individuals (p. 860). Of the Kubu, Hagen (Die Orang 
Kubu auf Sumatra) speaks (p. 93) of ten to twelve, and elsewhere (p. 95) 
of three to five huts. All the Veddas of a group are closely related 
(Seligmann, p. 68). The Botocudo groups may number ten to twenty 
families (Keane, J. A. I., xiii. 207—-The “‘horde”’ is an enlarged family— 
Von Tschudi, ii. 264). Some of the Australian local groups seem to be of 
this type and of about the same number (Howitt, p. 59). According to 
J. Mathew (EHaglehawk and Crow, p. 93), ‘‘the cohesion of a community 
rested entirely upon consanguinity,” the aggregation of families wherein 
the older men had a certain amount of control constituting the com- 
munity. Among the Central Australians a strong local group had about 
forty individuals, but owing to the marriage customs of the tribe they 
would not all be more closely related among themselves than with 
members of other groups. 

2 So far as the above account refers to the Malay tribes, it must be 


carefully noted that it is true only of the “ wild’? communities of the 
forest, not of the relatively settled people, who have come under Malay 


influence, and have frequently chiefs and something of an organized — 


government (see Martin, pp. 876-7). 


TYPES OF SOCIETY 45 


same rules, whatever they happen to be, permitting or restrict- 
ing further unions. Thus rules of marriage at first based on 
blood relationship are extended beyond it, and we get the 
germ of the system of marriage classes. Indeed, marriage 
outside the group, far from being opposed, may be favoured 
by more far-seeing elders, who recognize in it a source of 
strength... Be this as it may, we find above the isolated 
family group a stage at which the kindred is the nucleus of a 
wider but much looser organization generally spoken of as the 
tribe. The effective basis of this wider union is still inter- 
marriage. The group may indeed, through the working of 
rules of kinship, become wholly exogamous,? in which case it 
will still be thought of as a kindred, or marriage may be regu- 
lated by rules cutting across the group divisions of the tribe and 
restricting choice without forbidding marriage within the group 
limits. In this case the group will cease to be a distinct kindred, 
and will become a local division of a larger intermarrying tribe. 
These are familiar forms of tribal organization, which it will be 
well to illustrate by a concrete case. 

In Australia, a tribe such as the Wakelbura, which is typical 
of many, occupies exclusively a certain well-defined area. This 
is divided into lesser areas occupied by divisions of the tribe, and 
the subdivision may be followed till we come to the local unit 
consisting of men who are nearly related to one another, along 
with their wives who are “ brought from other localities.” % 
This is one way in which the tribe is divided. But there is a 
cross division dependent upon the marriage customs. The whole 
tribe is divided into two moieties which are “ exogamous ’’— 
that is to say, people must marry outside their own moiety. 
These moieties, again, are divided into sub-classes, and the sub- 
classes into totems. The totem is a class of objects, e. g. animals 
or plants, with which certain human beings have a mysterious 
affinity.. The animal has an influence over the human being, 
the human being can control or affect the procreation of the 
animal. Among the Wakelbura we find such totem names as 
the Plain Turkey, Small Bee, Opossum, Kangaroo, Emu, Carpet 
Snake, etc. The totems are also exogamous. 


1 This is, in fact, alleged as a practice, with the motive assigned in the 
text, among the natives of East Victoria by R. H. Matthews (Aboriginal 
Tribes of N.S. Wales and Victoria, p. 97). 

* As the Narrinyeri (Woods, p. 10). 

3 A. W. Howitt, The Organization of Australian Tribes, vol. i. part 2, 
1888, p. 101. 

4 Atleast among the Central Australians (Spencer and Gillen, I. chap. vi). 
I do not know whether this holds of the Wakelbura. 


46 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


Now the moiety and totem divisions go by “ mother-right,”’ 7. e. 
they are inherited through the mother, and it will be seen to 
follow that the women and children of any local group belong to 
different totems and the opposite moieties to their husbands and 
fathers. For example, a man of the Plain Turkey totem cannot 
marry a Plain Turkey woman. His wife will be, say, an Emu. 
Her children, male or female, will also be Emus. Hence any 
single local group must contain members of the two moieties and 
of different totems. The moieties and totems will accordingly 
be scattered among the different local divisions of the tribe. 
In other words, the two kinds of division will cross one another. 
On the one hand we have the local division corresponding to 
the actual grouping of men in their daily life. On the other 
we have a cross division into classes and totems which spread 
all over the tribe. The magical bond of totemism and the 
practice of intermarriage connected with it+ constitute a strand 
of connection holding the district local groups together. 

Considering the social structure as a whole, we find a smaller 
unit—the local group—based on near kinship and maintained 
by descent from parent to child, and a wider unity—the tribe— 
the parts of which are kept in close relationship by intermarriage, 
the whole structure being permeated by what at a higher stage 
we should call common religious beliefs, though here the beliefs 

re really not so much religious as magical.2, These appear to 
e the typical elements in early society. 

The matrimonial class cutting through the local groups of a 
tribe does not necessarily lead to any governmental organization. 
The fictive relationships on which it rests are psychologically of 
feeble efficacy for the purpose of building up a compact society. 


1 Members of the same totem are also in many tribes bound to mutual 
defence—in others not, as the Arunta (Spencer and Gillen, I. 211). The 
association of the totem with exogamy is also irregular. 

2 Howitt, op. cit., pp. 98-103. With other forms of Australian social 
organization and the stages of transition to a higher type I need not deal 
here (see Howitt, J. c., p. 102, and T'ribes of South-Hast Australia, chap. ii). 
Whether the local group is strictly exogamous depends on the rules of 
descent. The fundamental rule of marriage in Australia is the division of 
the tribe into two exogamous moieties, which, as a rule, are further sub- 
divided into classes barring marriage between the next successive genera- 
tions, or possibly two generations. The moiety and class may be reckoned 
by descent through the father or through the mother. Now the child 
generally (though not always) belongs to his father’s group. Hence, if 
the moiety is also patrilineal the group will be exogamous, as among the 
Narrinyeri and the Kurnai (Howitt, Kamilarot and Kurnai, p. 199). 
For the variation in the Australian rules of marriage and descent, see 
especially Howitt, chap. ili., and Spencer and Gillen, I. chap. ii, and II. 
chap. iii. . 


TYPES OF SOCIETY 47 


The relationships are all group relationships, 7. e. no distinction 
in name or in tribal custom is drawn between the blood brother 
and the tribal brother. A group of tribal brothers (a) inter- 
marrying with a group of sisters (b) will have, as children, brothers 
and sisters of a third group (c). This group relationship clearly 
does not lend itself to the family structure which hinges on the 
central position of the common ancestor or eldest male ascendant 
as representing him. But there is an alternative. The kindred 
may grow in numbers, intermarry with others, and so form 
a tribal union while preserving the structure of an enlarged 
family, and perhaps accentuating the powers of the head. 
It then corresponds better to our traditional notion of a 
clan—that is to say, a kind of enlarged family. In the clan 
‘Most familiar to us, where kinship is based on “ father-right ’”— 
that is, where the child inherits its father’s name and status— 
the government rests on the eldest male ascendant. A man 
and his wife, their sons with their wives, their grandchildren 
and great-grandchildren, may dwell together or near at hand, 
all ruled by the common progenitor. This is the familiar 
patriarchate of Genesis. But the clan-structure may also be 
built up on mother-right, in which case the organization is a 
degree more complex and less compact. Here the centre of 
the family is the mother, and all her children and daughters’ 
children belong to it. But her husband is not a member of it, 
neither are her daughters’ husbands. “They are strangers and 
sojourners in the abode of their wives, and often have to visit 
them in secret and avoid all communication with their wives’ 
relatives. This is the form of society known formerly as the 
matriarchate, but the term was a misnomer, since the cases in 
which the eldest woman rules are extremely rare, if they exist 
at all, while mother-right is common. The headship of such a 
clan is ordinarily inherited through the mother, but not by the 
mother, passing from her brother to her son and from her son to 
\ her daughter’s son. 

~< The clan, whether maternal or paternal, has certain character- 
istic features. Take, for example, the Malay Suku, the unit of 
the original Malay Society. Here membership of the Sukus 
goes by female descent, the headship is partly inherited through 
the mother but in part elective, and the head dispenses justice 
except in the grave cases for which an assembly of heads are 
gathered together. The clan owns all the land which its 


At the same time men of the same marriage class may stand by one 
another in a quarrel (Spencer and Gillen, I. p. 211) and the “tribal 
brothers” protect a man or woman (Roth, p. 140). 


48 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


members occupy. The men who marry into it cannot touch 
their wives’ property without the consent of her family. It 
protects and avenges its members and is collectively answerable 
for their misdeeds. These are ordinary features of clan-life, 
though naturally they are worked out with many differences of 
detail.1 

As to government, for example, there are many variations in 
the power of the head and the mode of his appointment. He 
may have absolute powers of life and death lke the Roman 
father, or, to take an example from the domain of mother-right, 
like the maternal uncle or grandfather among some African 
people, such as the Barea and Kunama.”? Or he may have little 
power to act without the consent of the clan. Thus, in the 
Indian law books his position fluctuates between that of a 
patriarch and the manager of a joint stock. He may have the 
right at will to expel his son from the family, as apparently in 
the older Babylonian law, or this right may be expressly limited, 
as in Hammurabi’s code. Finally, he may himself be set aside 
for incompetence, as is possible at the present day in the joint — 
family of the Deccan and of Montenegro, and could be done by 
the Phratry under Athenian law.® 

The clan may also be ruled by a council, as among the Wyan- 
dots, where a council of four women was chosen by the women. 
These four selected a chief from among their sons and brothers, 
and the aggregate of the gentile councils so constituted form the 
council of the tribe.® 

Again, the extent of the clan may vary greatly. Under 

1 Waitz, Anthropologie, 5, i. pp. 139-142. 

2 The theory of Manu, Book VIII, 416, is that all the property is the 
father’s. Among the Kondhs, too, the father is absolute, the sons having 
no property, but with their wives and children sharing the common meal 


(J. D. Mayne, A Treatise on Hindu Law, p. 231; Post, Grundriss der 
Ethnologischen Jurisprudenz, i. 136). | 

3 Mayne, 255-298. . 

sia E assume in the text, for the sake of argument, that the “ Sumerian | 
Laws ”’ do represent actual custom of early date. According to the third ! 
of these “‘ laws,” the father, by disowning his son, could expel him from 
house and “ wall” (?). The mother could deprive him of the house and 
its furniture. On the other hand, the son, for disowning his father, could 
be thrown into chains and sold, and for disowning his mother, he could be ~ 
driven out of house and town (Meissner, Beitrage zum Altbabylonisthen 
Privatrecht, p. 14). In Hammurabi (sections 168 and 169), the father‘e¢an 
only disinherit for a second offence, confirmed by the judgment of a court. 
In contracts of the period, both the older and newer usages are found 
(Kohler and Peiser, Hammurabi’s Gesetz, p. 134 ff). If the Sumerian Laws 
form a real code, they are, as Kohler and Peiser have pointed out, distinctly 
more archaic than Hammurabi. 

5 Post, op. cit., 1. pp. 137, 138. 

. Powell, Wyandot Government, Di Ol. 





TYPES OF SOCIETY 4h 


ftather-right, for example, it may hold together only while the 
common ancestor lives, or it may continue in being after his 
death, his eldest son, or next brother, succeeding him, or the 
succession, perhaps, being determined by free choice. Some 
writers distinguish the two forms as the Patriarchal Family 
and Joint Family respectively, and both are common enough in 
modern India.1_ There is no necessary limit at which the family 
must break up, though naturally the disruptive tendencies in- 
erease with its size. In India, the presumption of the law is 
that the family is undivided, but this presumption is naturally 
weaker in proportion as the relationship is more remote. Often, 
as in parts of the Malay world, among the Nairs of the Malabar 
coast, and among the North American Indians, a vigorous joint 
family system grows up on the basis of mother-right. Some- 
times a group of families occupy one large house, each family 
having its own apartments. Among the Iroquois the members 
of the Long House carried out their harvest in common and had 
a common store administered by the elder women and distributed 
by them among the different apartments.? 


3. The intermarrying clans form a tribe, which, however, may 
be a very loose organization. Thus, among the Western Déné, 
we are told that there was no bond between different villages 
except the gentile tie which would be due to exogamy, and also 
probably to migration, and here there was no common head of 
the clan. As long as the clan maintains the right of protecting 
its own members the gentile tie will be more effectual than the 
tribal. Here it is important to remark that the effects of inter- 
marriage on the social structure differ materially according as 
mother-right or father-right prevails. Under mother-right the 
result of marriage outside the clan—‘“ clan exogamy ”’—is that 
the man will always belong to a different clan from that of his 
wife and children, who are accordingly more closely dependent 
on the wife’s brother than on her husband.* The result is to 


1 Mayne, 223-232. The ruler, after the father’s death, may be the 
eldest male—the eldest brother, ‘‘by consent,” according to Narada—or 
he may be chosen, as among the Todas. 

2 Morgan, Houselife, pp. 63, 66. 

8 Morice, ‘“‘ Manners and Customs of the Western Déné,”’ in Proceedings 
of the Canadian Institute, vol. vii. p. 142. 

“ Thus the uncle (or whatever other relation the particular constitution 
of the clan may designate) will have the right of protecting or punishing 
the children, giving the girls in marriage, etc. The children will inherit 
‘rom him, and in case of divorce they remain in the mother’s clan (for 
»xamples, see Post, i. 72-78). The uncle may even have the right to 
orotect the child against its own father, e. g. among the Barea, Bazen, and 


E 


50 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


introduce a cross division, a cleavage that cuts through family 
and clan life.1 We have seen this cross division at work among 
the Australians, but there we thought of it mainly as a bond of 
union between little groups of low organization. In relation to. 
a more developed system of kinship, however, its other effects 
become important. The bond that unites separate clans mars 
the unity of the family itself. This is very apparent where, as 
among the North American Indians, exogamy is based on 
Totemism, The members of the totem are bound to mutual 
defence, and, as the same totem may be found in quite remote 
parts—as e.g. there will be Bears or Beavers all over North 
America, there is a potential bond of union over a wide district. 
But equally, since the totem is exogamous, no one totem by itself 
can form a society. In some cases two totems are, one may 
say, marriage partners, 7.e. the men of one must take wives 
only from the women of another. More generally there is no 
such restriction, but two or more totems live together and inter- 
marry. Thus among the Iroquois there were eight totems— 
the Wolf, Bear, Beaver, Turtle, Deer, Snipe, Heron and Hawk.? 
All or most of these were found in each of the five “ nations ” 
or local communities into which the Iroquois were divided. In 
each “‘ nation ”’ or local community there would be Beaver men 
with Bear wives and children, Bear men with Beaver wives and 
children, the totem bond cutting clean across the family and local 
divisions. 

This dual relationship became a means of achieving a higher 
political Union. The famous League of the Five Nations was 
founded on the fact that each nation contained the eight totemic 
groups enumerated above, and that the totem tie was held as 
strong as the local tie—so that two Hawks of different nations 
would have stood together against a Heron or a Bear of their 
own nation. This cross division formed a natural basis for 
union, and its strength was attested by the success and dura- 


Kunama. Cf. Rivers, in The Cambridge Expedition, p. 151. In the Torres 
Straits a fight would be stopped, if one of the combatants saw his mother’s 
brother on the other side. The father also had power to stop a fight, but 
it was less absolute (ib., 144, 145). In some cases both the paternal and 
maternal gens were bound to help an injured member, e. g. among the 
Kwakiutl (Boaz, B. A., 1889, p. 833). 

1 The children might even return to the mother’s tribe, though brought 
up with her in that of the father—as among the Thlinkeets (Boaz, B. A., 
1888, p. 237). This would still further dislocate the family. 

2 Originally these formed two exogamous groups, 7.e. Wolf, Bear, 
Turtle and Beaver could not intermarry, but must take a partner from 
one of the other four totems. But this restriction broke down (Morgan, 
League of the Iroquois, p. 83). 


TYPES OF SOCIETY 51 


bility of the League. What was done consciously by the Iroquois 
was. if the view suggested be correct, an application of a principle 
which, operating in less conscious form, has contributed in large 
measure to the formation of organized society. The practice 
of marrying outside the family would cause every local aggre- 
gation of peoples to consist of individuals belonging to two 
families or more, and while the physical tie bound the husband 
to his wife’s children the marriage tie bound both him and 
them to other families. In this we may, perhaps, find an 
explanation both of the wide prevalence of varying rules of 
exogamy and of the horrors attending its breach. If the 
structure of any society were bound up with the maintenance 
of exogamy it is in accordance with the normal processes of 
social evolution that a strongly-felt tradition should assist to 
safeguard the practice and to condemn and destroy those who 
break it.1 

Be this as it may, let us note the form of social union arrived 
at under mother-right and exogamy. We have (1) the clan, 
the enlarged family, living together and connected by ties of 
descent through the female. (2) The marriage-relation cutting 
across the clans and grafting the sons and brothers of one clan 
on to another as husbands and fathers. On the basis of this 
connection we may have (3) the local community of several 
intermarrying clans living side by side, and (4) a wider tribal 
union so far as the unity of the totem or marriage class extends. 
There is here a possible basis for an extensive but somewhat 
loose organization, the totem bond tending to weaken rather 
than to strengthen that of the clan. 

Under father-right the development is simpler. So far as 
exogamy prevails this will still form a bond of connection be- 
tween separate stocks, but the wife now passes out of her family 
into that of her husband, and her children are his. Hence the 
division cutting across the family is no longer to be found.? 
Without it the family group is more closely knit. Yet the tie 
formed by intermarriage, though less strong than under the 
other system, would still be very real. The wife becomes a 
member of the family into which she marries, but she still retains 
relationship with her blood kindred, and cognatio—relation- 
ship through either parent—is generally recognized by the 

1 On the instinctive element underlying exogamy, see below, chap. iv. 

* Among the Australian tribes, indeed, the totem (or class) divides the 
family as much under father-right as under mother-right. In either case, 
one parent is separated from the children. But “‘ father-right ”’ at a stage 


when the family is so little developed, means much less than the father-right 
of the clan system. 


a 


52 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


side of agnatio, strict male kinship alone.1 A group of such 
intermarrying families therefore forms a community united by 
countless interwoven strands of affinity and blood relationship, 
while the component units would be more compact than under © 
mother-right.? 


1 As e. g. among the Celts (Vinogradoff, Growth of the Manor, pp. 10-12), 
‘and still more strongly among the primitive Germans (7b., 135, 136). 

2 It is probably owing to the importance of intermarriage as a bond of 
union in early society that prohibitions of marriage generally extend 
over a wider circle of relationships in primitive than in advanced peoples 
(Westermarck, 297 ff.), and that they are often highly developed under the 
paternal, no less than under the maternal system. Thus, in early Rome, 
marriage was forbidden within the sixth degree of cognatio (Westermarck, 
308); in Manu, between all Sapindas, 7%. e. to the seventh degree. Manu 
further opposes marriage between all relations through the male (Manu, iil. 
section 5. The law is not stated very stringently—a damsel fulfilling these 
conditions is recommended to twice-born men). The law re-appears in the 
minor codes. Apastamba, ii. v. 11, 15-16; Gautama, iv. 2-5; Vasishtha, 
vill. 1, 2; Vishnu, xxiv. §9, 10. According to J. D. Mayne, pp. 87, 88, 
though Manu applies the rule to twice-born men only, it is also observed by 
the Kurumbas, Meenas, Kondhs of Orissa, and Dravidian tribes of S. India. 
In China, marriage is forbidden to all of the same name (Alabaster, 177). 

Such prohibitions may, of course, be combined with clan or race or caste ~ 
endogamy (prohibitions to marry outside the group concerned). The union 
of exogamy in one relation with endogamy in another leads to much con- 
fusion in the discussion of the subject, and obscures the functions and 
tendencies of each rule. Thus, the suggestion that the clan is built up by 
exogamy may be countered by the production of endogamous clans. This 
would be fallacious, since the exogamy which helps to build the clan is 
the prohibition of marriage between near kin, not that of marriage within 
the clan itself. But the working of endogamy illustrates by contrast the 
uniting effects of intermarriage. In the history of Rome, each step towards © 
a wider union seems to have been accompanied by a breakdown of endo- — 
gamous rules. Originally marriage seems to have been limited to the 
“gens ”’ (Westermarck, quoting Mommsen and Marquardt, 368), or perhaps 
the “‘curia”’ (see Ihering, Evolution of the Aryan, p. 334). Then the 
patrician gentes formed a circle of intermarrying clans. The plebs 
obtained the jus connubii in 445 B.c. (Mommsen, I. p. 297), and hence- 
forward the distinction of patrician and plebeian fadedaway. Further, 
the Latini Prisci had the jus connubit from an early period (Mommsen, I. 
p- 100; Girard, 104), and the extension of this form of Latinitas, and 
still more of Roman citizenship, meant at every stage a widening of the 
circle within which marriage was possible, till it embraced the whole free 
population of the empire. At each remove endogamy is the separator, — 
intermarriage the bond of union. 

The line of thought developed in the text points to the conclusion that 
it is the combination of the tie of intermarriage with that of descent that — 
forms the basis of primitive society. But to lay this down as our positive — 
conclusion would be to go beyond the evidence. There are rude societies — 
in existence, in which no rule of exogamy holds, so that even the union of — 
parent and child is permitted (several instances are given in Westermarck, ~ 
pp. 290, 291). On the other hand, Post, Grundriss, 1. p. 33) justly remarks 
that close unions are scarcely ever enjoined, unless to preserve the purity 
of blood (as among the Pharaohs and the Incas), or possibly to preserve the — 
family property. Such reasons imply a society that is already well estab- 
lished, from which the need of intermarriage to maintain the social bond Y 





TYPES OF SOCIETY 53 


Of course, even in early society the principle of kinship is 
not as rigid in practice as it is in theory. It admits of an 
element of fiction, since the inclusion of strangers and slaves, 
which is seldom wholly unknown, makes the community of 
blood in part at least imaginary. But it is altogether in accord- 
ance with primitive ideas that the make-believe—if the belief 
is properly made with all due rites and conditions fulfilled—is 
just as good as the reality, and so the adopted son fills the place 
of a real son. But though he is not really bound by the blood 
tie, the fictions used to constitute him one of the family are 
an evidence to us showing how strong the sense of the blood 
tie is. This sense finds its expression in the family worship, 
the funeral feast to the dead kindred, and the belief that none 
but the actual kin, or those who have with due formality been 
made such, may lawfully do this service to the dead. Hence 
the fear of calamities, of troubles from unfed and unpropitiated 
ghosts, if the family should ever die out. Hence, again, the 
duty of maintaining the family succession, the intense desire 
for male descendants, and the community of property out of 
which the funeral feasts are served. The patriarchal family is 
‘in ideal an undying unity. Unencumbered by the cross currents 

of feeling set in motion by mother-right, it carries the tie of 
kinship and the affections of the household to their highest 
development, while it is none the less capable of utilizing inter- 
marriage or the ramifications of descent to extend the bonds 
of kinship, and so build up a wider union. Thus, as in the case 
of the Roman gens, the clan may be a much wider society than 
any family group connected by a known common descent. 
Again, distinct clans may be parts of a still wider, if looser union, 
bound by a sense of kinship. Thus beyond the Greek yévos we 
have the ¢pazpia, and beyond that the ¢vAy, each maintaining 








has already fallen away. On the other hand, in a primitive people where 
the social order was only in the making, it is certainly reasonable to sup- 
pose that the objection to marriage between those of the same stock (on 
whatever principle kinship be reckoned) would tend to keep society together, 
while a preference for such marriages would tend to break it up. 

The forces binding men together are in reality complex, but if we imagine 
kinship to be the only one, and then conceive two families living in prox- 
imity, first with an exogamous, and then with an endogamous rule, we shall 
be able to understand the function of exogamy. The two intermarrying 
families will form in all essentials the nucleus of a community. The two 
which do not intermarry must remain permanently separate. Hach may 
grow, but if the in-and-in tendency persists, kinship still being assumed 
to remain the sole basis of union, they will tend constantly to split up, the 
ties between each section being so much closer than those between more 
distant kin. Thus the practice of intermarriage is the main condition 
determining the formation and governing the limits of early society. 


54 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


a certain bond between its members resting on real or sup 
posed kinship.t Indeed, the paternal clan has very naturally 
formed the starting point for the development of nearly all the 
civilized races, Aryan, Semitic and Mongol, and has left its 
marks deep in the life of the great nations which have arisen 
out of it. 

We are led, then, to think of the simplest societies as living in 
‘‘enlarged families,’ and of those just above them as forming 
larger aggregates, principally on the basis of intermarriage. 
Within these aggregates or tribes the groups remain though modi- 
fied in various ways, and constitute at first the more vital and 
effective social organism, the organization of the tribe becoming 
important as society advances. These points are reflected in a 
comparison of the accounts of government which we obtain 
among peoples of different economic grades. Considering first 
the inner group, we find a considerable number of cases 
among the Lower Hunters where no effective government can 
be asserted apart from the household. The proportion of such 
cases to all those of which we have information falls steadily 
from approximately one-half among the Lower Hunters to one- 
tenth in the second grade of agriculture and to none in the 
higher economic grades.2 Passing to the government of the 
tribe, we have considerable difficulty in comparing like with — 
like. But, putting together all the cases in which we find — 
evidence of a recognized government in a definite social unity 
superior to the clan or local group, we find them numbering 
from a quarter to nearly a third of the whole among the Hunters — 
and in the lowest agricultural grade, rising to nearly a half in 
the next grade of agricultural, and to over three-fourths in the © 
highest pastoral and agricultural peoples, where, moreover, in 
many instances, the organization of government goes altogether 
beyond the tribal type and reaches that of a petty kingdom. 


4. (B) The Principle of Authority. 
The types of social organization hitherto described may be © 
looked upon as spontaneous growths resting on the natural ties © 


1 Busolt, Staats und Rechtsaltertiimer, p. 21 ff. 

2 Simpler Peoples, p. 51. 

3 It is not always clear, e. g. whether a village containing several clans — 
or joint families should be ranked as a “tribe” for this purpose. It is © 
probably one of a number of villages all reckoned as one tribe, so that © 
relatively to them it is an inner group. Compared with a hunting people, 
on the other hand, it probably contains as many individuals and as complex” 
an internal structure as a tribe. The comparisons we give probably under- 
estimate, through caution on this point, the extent of the change found in ' 
passing from the lowest to the higher economic grades. 






TYPES OF SOCIETY 55 


_of blood relationship, intermarriage and neighbourhood. By 
consequence they are suited to small societies. It is true that 
they widen out into broader organizations; many clans form 
one tribal union; a number of communes form a district, and 
perhaps own a common chief. Sometimes even, as in the 
League of the Iroquois, these unions are the deliberate work 
of barbarian statesmen, so that something more than mere 
spontaneous semi-instinctive social forces come into play. But 
these wider ramifications have, as a rule, been loosely and feebly 
connected. The living energy remains with the small, con- 
centrated unit. How, then, are larger aggregations built into 

- compact societies? The most direct method is that of forcible 
subjection to a single chief or a ruling class. In the primitive 
tribe the power of the chief is seldom great or even assured. In 
the commune the headman is little more than a chairman of 
the folkmoot. But when a people begin a career of conquest 

_ two things happen. They themselves must have discipline, and 
they need a war-chief with unlimited powers. The war-chief 
surrounds himself with his following, his comites, who attach 
themselves to his fortunes, and is a simpleton if he cannot make 
the state of war or the fear of war so permanent that his own 
absolute authority becomes indefinitely prolonged. On the 
other hand, captive prisoners form for the first time an important 
slave class, or perhaps the lands of conquered peoples are left 
to them to till as serfs under the lordship of favoured individuals 
from the comitatus of the war-chief. Hence, on the one hand 
the decay of free institutions among the conquerors, and on the 
other the growth of classes within society. All the great civiliza- 
tions, those of western Europe, of the far East, of Mexico and 
Peru, of ancient Egypt and Babylonia, seem to have experienced 
his stage of development. But it should be noted that the 
despotic system arises, and in some respects finds its most 
extreme developments, among people still in the stage of bar- 
barism. For example, in West Africa, as in Dahomey and 
Ashanti, we find the principle pushed to the point that the king 
is absolute master of the persons and property of every one of 
his subjects. He can put any one to death at pleasure, any 
man may be his slave, any woman taken to his harem. The 
political exaltation of the monarch is often accentuated by 
a certain phase in the growth of religious conceptions. He 
becomes a man-god like the Pharaohs; his person is sacred; no 
eone may look on him and live—finally he becomes taboo and so 
full of danger to his subjects that he has to be secluded, and the 
almighty being ends in becoming a helpless puppet in the hands 


= peo ape 


56 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


of his priests. Perhaps he becomes responsible for good and 
evil fortune, for sunshine and rain, and if he manages the weather 
badly, his absolute power will avail him little and his spirit 
stands in imminent danger of a compulsory migration to another 
representative of the royal line. Where religion is too advanced 
for the actual deification of the king, as in western Kurope, 
he may yet be God’s representative, and so, e.g. the theory 
of divine right arose in England when feudalism passed into 
absolutism and the king who could not be God Himself proclaimed 
himself at least God’s viceregent. 

The personal power of the king, whatever the theory of abso- 
lutism may be, is limited by hard facts of human nature; 
monarchs, whatever their courtier priests may say, are not gods, 
and therefore can in fact rule in person only as much as they 
can themselves oversee and understand. Hence personal abso- 
lutism is for the most part limited to a narrow circle. A Cesar 
or Napoleon may really supervise the affairs of a great empire, 
but as a general rule the absolute monarchy which I have 
described has effective existence only over a comparatively 
small area. A conqueror of a wider territory has, after all, to 
divest himself of most of his real authority over it. To retain a 
nominal supremacy he must parcel it out among his followers, 
or perhaps leave the native chiefs in possession as tributaries. 
In either case the ruler of the subject province will probably — 
have much real independence. Where the native prince remains ~ 
things will go on very much as they did before. The distant — 
great king will be known as one who exacts a tribute, but in ~ 
no other capacity. Where the king institutes one of his own 
followers or a great noble of the conquering people as the local 
governor, he retains at first a more direct control. But where — 
the territory is large and the means of communication rude, — 
the position of the man on the spot is the stronger. The great ~ 
officer acquires much practical independence, and often succeeds ~ 

\ in making his position hereditary, and a feudal system replaces — 
absolute monarchy. 
fi The conflicts between the two principles of local_and central 
authority make up a large part of political history. At the — 
f one extréemé the monarch succeeds in governing his people © 
through officials wholly dependent on his favour. At the ~ 
other he sinks into the position of being merely the first in i 
rank in an order of practically equal and independent nobles. — 
The latter alternative is apt to be the more depressing to the 
general condition of the people. But in any case the masses — 
find themselves at the base of the social hierarchy which has 4 





TYPES OF SOCIETY 57 


now arisen to replace the simpler and comparatively equal 

conditions of the earlier social order. The best they can hope 

for is to be let alone, and in fact throughout the East the later 
despotism is merely superimposed on the older organizations 
which persist beneath its sway comparatively undisturbed, and 

maintain their vitality while empires rise and fall. Such a 

state of civilization may, as Egypt, Babylonia and China have 

shown, persist for thousands of years without essential change 
in the customs of the people, who in reality take too small a part 
in the life of a greater community to which they belong to 

j affect or be gravely affected by its vicissitudes. But naturally 

ney of despotic organization is upon the whole to 
epress the condition of the masses: in some cases large slave 

populations are formed; in others a caste system arises; in 
others the tillers of the soil sink into one or other of the many 
forms of serfdom, while the conquering race are the lords of the 
and. All these forms of class subordination should be reckoned 

s expressions of the despotic principle in social organization ; it 

snot only the form of government but the whole social structure 

hich is infused with this dominating dnfluence. 

We are not, of course, to suppose that any society rests upon 
force undiluted. In the first place, as already remarked, the 
old forms of organization generally retain a measure of their 
vitality in spite of conquest. The conquerors themselves are 
united by ties of blood by the gentile, the tribal, or the com- 
munal bond, they have their own law and customs, resting not 
on force but upon the deep-lying social principles which have 
bound them together from of old, and which guide them by 
some principle of justice, if it be but in the division of the booty. 
In the second place, they find similar institutions flourishing 
among the conquered and have to make their account with 
these; but further, and in the third place, both from enlightened 
self-interest and from the inextinguishable element of self- 
judgment in man which makes him cling to the semblance of 
right most of all when he is rejecting the reality, the conqueror 
cannot bear to rest his title permanently on force alone. He 
seeks to transmute force into authority. For this he will find 
a@ means in religion and an instrument in the priesthood. But 
at the same time the ethical element has its opportunity, and 
insists with varying degrees of clearness and emphasis that the 
real authority of the ruler must be derived from his power to 
govern for the good of the people. The simple but compre- 
hensive code of despotism merely lays down that one man is 

| divinely appointed to determine what is best for all others, and 


















58 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


therewith transmutes arbitrary power into righteous authority 
and slavish subjection into loyal service. 

As to the way in which the duties of a ruler are conceived, 
we find, of course, every shade of difference in the empires and 
kingdoms of history. Thus, a military tribe of barbarians will 
merely raid their neighbours for slaves or for human sacrifice, or 
they will conquer them for the sake of tribute. But where a 
more civilized morality prevails, and particularly in so far as 
conquest ends in an amalgamation of races, and a kingdom 
comes to be a unity, the ethical principle of the common good 
asserts itself, and is enforced by religious sanctions. The lord 
has duties to his serfs, the feudal superior to his vassals, the 
king to all his subjects. Such duties are by no means peculiar 
to modern and Christian communities. We find them hardly 
less prominent in the earliest civilizations. The feudal rulers of 
Egypt, for example, the princes of the Nomes, always take a 
special credit for their uprightness as governors, their goodness 
to the poor, their mercifulness to the weak. A deceased governor 
under the 12th Dynasty asserts that he was “the staff of 
support to the aged, the foster-father of the children, the coun- 
sellor of the unfortunate, the refuge in which those who suffer 
from the cold in Thebes may warm themselves, the bread of the 
afflicted which never failed in the city of the South.”1 The 
Chinese Empire, though in form an absolute despotism, was in 
ethical principle an empire administered by a divine race for 
the good of the governed. The duty of the prince to his people 
was the constant theme of the classical moralists, and their 
teaching took tangible shape in the right of freely criticizing 
the emperor maintained by the censors chosen from the educated 
class. Thus in the settled and homogeneous kingdom we have 
a régime in which government originating in force is tempered 
by moral considerations and evolves into some form of recognized 
hierarchical authority. ‘The law emanates not from society as a 


whole, but from its central figure and chief ruler. It expresses © 


not the natural conditions of social life, but the will of the 
supreme lord, the representative it may be of the deity. Or it 


is the possession of a priestly caste to whom it has been en- 


trusted by the powers that rule the universe. The essential 
point is that law is imposed by the ruler upon the ruled, itisa 
command from a Superior to a subordinate, it is not any longer 


conceived as a custom arising out of the conditions of life among — 


those who have to conform to it, neither is it a rule of action 


voluntarily adopted for the common good. 
1 Maspero, The Dawn of Civilization, p. 338. 


Se 


TYPES OF SOCIETY 59 


When consolidated by history, by the gradual blending of 
races, and perhaps by common deience against the foreigner, 
the kingdom gains some of the characteristics of a free com- 
munity. Having done so it may, and if it has the opportunity, 
probably will, start afresh on a career of conquest beyond its 
borders. If successful, it will build up an empire, and here, 
again, there will be many gradations in the tempering of force 
with higher social and moral considerations. Outside their 
borders the great kingdoms of the ancient East appear to have 
conquered largely to obtain slaves or tribute, and the principal 
duty of the local governor was to collect taxes, and forward the 
produce to the supreme lord at Thebes, Babylon or Nineveh. 
In the Persian Empire we seem to recognize the beginning of a 
higher stage. At least its kings interested themselves in the 
pure administration of justice, and Cambyses flays the corrupt 
judge and covers the judgment seat with his skin to be a memento 
and a warning to his successor. The Romans went much 
further, and developed their conquests into something more 
nearly resembling a commonwealth by developing local institu- 
tions and throwing down barriers between conqueror and con- 
quered. And in proportion as supernatural sanctions have lost 
strength the modern empire-states have still more distinctly felt 
the necessity for some other bond than that of naked force or 
self-constituted authority to link the scattered parts together. 
Thus the furthest development of the principle of authority 
points to the necessity for that remaining bond of social union 

which has yet to be described. 
~ To sum up the results which the despotic principle—whether 
we regard it as authority resting ultimately on force or as force 
transmuted into authority—has given us— 

lst.—As to the forms of Society, we have 

(a) The Absolute Monarchy, where the king is divine and 
lord without restraint of the persons and properties 
of his subjects. This form has most vitality in 
relatively small and barbaric communities. 

(b) The Feudal Monarchy, suited to wider areas where 
power is delegated, and the governing class form a 
hierarchy. 

(c) The Empire, formed by the aggregation of kingdoms, 
overstepping national boundaries and exhibiting very 
varying degrees of unity and of local freedom. 

2nd.—As to the nature of Government, the conception of a 
moral duty to the governed develops in proportion to the degree 

1 Herodotus, Book V. chap. xxv. 


60 | MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


of unity achieved, but throughout law is conceived as based 
upon authority and the social system on the subordination of 
class to class. For this order a religious sanction is found, 
generally in the special association of the ruler with the deity, 
often also in the semi-divine character of the ruling race or 
caste, or, simply, in the belief in their conquering and civilizing 
mission. 

If, finally, we may endeavour to sum up in a sentence the 
function of this principle in human evolution, we may say that 
it belongs to epochs of expansion in culture and improvements 
in the arts of life. It is one method by which large communities 
can be formed with greater facilities for self-preservation and 
for the maintenance of internal order than the primitive clan or 
village commune can enjoy. We shall also find that on certain 
sides the order it imposes is not only more adequate but ethically 
higher than that attained by the clan. On the other hand, it 
tends to perpetuate, and in some respects to deepen those 
distinctions between man and man which, as we shall see, it is 
a main function of the ethical spirit to overcome. It avoids 
this error in so far as it embodies or makes room for something 
of the third principle with which we now have to deal. 


5. (C) The Principle of Citizenship—Personal Rights and the 
Common Good. 

A paternal government resting ultimately on force, but 
justifying its position in its own eyes by kindly consideration 
for the good of its subjects, is not the last word of civilized 
society. A type of social organization exists in which the rela- 
tions of government and governed are in a manner inverted. 
Government is conceived not as itself the source of unquestioned 
authority, but as a function which certain individuals are dele- 
gated to perform as servants, “‘ ministers’’ of the public as a 
whole. The structure of the laws, the acts of executive govern- 
ment, are not so many commands issued by a.superior and 
obeyed by the people, but are customs and decisions expressing 
the character and depending on the resolves of the people them- 
selves. The subjects of a government have become citizens of a 
state, and the citizen has rights which are no less important 
than his duties. ‘These rights hold good as against the govern- 
ment just as they hold against other individuals, for it is a 


prime characteristic of the state based on citizenship that it — 


establishes the reign of law, and subjects its own officers to this 
impersonal sovereign. 
On this side, then, the state stands in strong contrast with 





a > a eae 


TYPES OF SOCIETY 61 


the despotic empire. Its government rests not so much on the 
authority of a superior as on the consent of the bulk of its mem- 
bers. Compulsion, of course, is still necessary in the enforce- 
ment of law, but its methods are less violent and at the same 
time more effective. The severity of punishment diminishes, 
political offences become rarer, and free discussion and criticism 
are no longer found incompatible with social order. In the | 
societies which have advanced furthest in this direction all. 
classes are admitted finally to a share or a voice in the govern- 
ment. In some respects this description recalls the earlier 
tribe. For there, too, law or custom was the direct expres- 
sion of the will, or, at any rate, of the character and traditions 
of the people. It came from them and was not imposed on 
them. So it is not wholly without reason that reformers 
struggling with the weight of the bureaucratic machinery under 
an arbitrary government have looked back on primitive life as 
an ideal state of liberty and freedom from which civilization was 
a luckless departure. But this is only a half truth—hardly 
even so much. There is very little really in common between 
the “liberty ’’ of the clan or tribe and_ that which the law 
secures to the citizen in a civilized state. For, if on one side 
the state rests on general consent,! on the other side its constitu- 
tion is rooted in the personal rights of its citizens.. Its com- 
ponent members or units are not groups, but individuals. In 
the clan and the tribe, as will appear more fully in sub- 
sequent chapters, the individual has no legal position, scarcely 
even the possibility of existence, apart from the body to which 
he belongs. The family, the clan, or the village, or perhaps 
all three, are responsible to him for his safety, responsible to 
others for his wrong-doing, responsible, we may almost say, for 
his maintenance. His life is laid down by his place in them, 
his property is in the main a share in their property, his gods 
are their gods. He cannot leave them, nor can he enter into 
obligations which will have the effect of binding them. His 
position in the group is, as it were, an exhaustive account of his 
existence, and he has little personal life apart from it. In the 
state all this is greatly changed. The individual is now a 
responsible agent. As soon as he comes to mature years he 


1 Even under this aspect, the state does not really resemble the primitive 
community as closely as it appears to do. In the latter, custom has a 
magical or religious sanction, and in its main lines is unalterable. In the 
state it is freely modifiable by legislation. Thus, in the primitive tribe, 
though the social structure doubtless rests ultimately on the character of 
the people, it does not express their free deliberate choice, for free criticism 

of established custom is not yet a part of their character. 


62 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


stands or falls by himself. He and no one else is punished if 
he does wrong, and his engagements place no liability on any 
one except those who are directly or indirectly parties to them. 
He is free to alienate his property, to enter into contracts with 
whom he will, to quit his home, and even to emigrate and 
abandon his allegiance to the state itself. The minor groups to 
which he belongs are either mere local bodies created afresh by 
the state which delegates to them some of its rights and duties, 
or they are voluntary associations which the citizen himself 
forms by agreement with others and which fill an ever larger 
part in public and private life. He even forms his own church 
and holds his own creed, and his gods need not be those of 
the state. At the same time, the responsibilities of the old 
‘natural’? groups are taken over and are even amplified by 
the state, which owes its members protection in the exercise 
of all rights which it recognizes, and, generally speaking, holds 
itself bound at need to stand between them and sheer starvation. 
In a word, the state, and particularly the modern state, recog- 
nizes the claims of human personality as neither the commune 
nor the monarchy can afford to do. It exists for a common 
good, but its function is to maintain private rights. 

There lies in this statement, however, a speculative as well 
as a practical difficulty, to pause upon which for a moment will 
help us to understand the nature and development of the state. 
For if government is circumscribed in its action by the rights 
of citizens, it would seem that a standard of conduct is being set 
up which is alien in origin, and may at any time be opposed 
in practice to the common good. The solution is found by 
considering in what the common good consists, and what is the 
foundation of an individual right. The community consists of 
men and women, who find their happiness in the life which 
makes the most of their capacities as thinking, feeling, active 
beings. In other words, the ‘“‘ good” for each man lies in the 
realization of what is in him, the development of his personality. 
Now, since this is an imperfect world, the growth of one per- 
sonality may be the cramping of another. But, fortunately, 
there is another possibility, since by developing certain sides 
of ourselves, far from injuring or cramping, we stimulate and 
assist the similar development of others. Now what form of de- 
velopment is best for the individual is a question of the ultimate 
basis of morals, as to which we shall have something to say at 
a later stage. But if we judge from the point of view of the 
common good, as we are now doing, our choice is clear. We 
can see that one kind of self-development, if attempted by 


TYPES OF SOCIETY 63 


everybody, will be eventually destructive, while another kind 
will harmonize with itself and grow. In this alone is there the 
possibility of a good for each which is also a good for all—a 
common good. Calling the basis of this kind of self-develop- 
ment the social personality, we may define the common good as. 
consisting in the development of the social personality, and in 
its name every member of society Has a right to the conditions 
requisite for such a development, so far as they are generally 
attainable by social action. On the other hand, no rights exist 
but those which the common good prescribes. For a right is a_ 
claim which one man makes on the actions or forbearance of 
others, and which is sustained by an impartial judgment. But 
an impartial judgment is one which looks beyond the individual, 
and recognizes that the right claimed by one must be maintained 
for all. But no right could be practically maintained for all 
which was incompatible with the safety of the community, nor 
could any right be desirable for all which inflicted net loss on 
the community. Hence the rights of each are such as it is for 
the good of all to maintain.) 

The generic character of the state, then, is that of a community 
whose structure and character depend on the good-will of the 
bulk of its members, and whose welfare rests accordingly on 
their loyalty and public feeling, while it is for them the source 
and guarantee of the free exercise of their rights as citizens. 

/ Thus, the citizen is a fully responsible agent with assignable 
rights and duties as member of a community. So far as the 
idea of the community is carried through, i.e. so far as the 
common good really is common to all belonging to it, the rights 
and duties must fall to all members alike, excepting only as the 
needs of the common welfare demand a difference. That is to 
say, privileges of whatever kind must depend on the exercise 
of functions which they encourage or render possible, and the 
taking up of such functions must be open to all who are capable 
of them. Such is the general character, in the baldest state- 
ment, of the type of civic community or state, with its two 
main features, the responsible individual fully seized of civic 
rights and obligations, and the responsible government express- 
ing the will of the whole society in law and administration. 
Thus security under law and the power of the community to 
make and modify the law express the bare essentials of the 
state. 


1 That is, for the good in the long run. There may often be a conflict 
between expediency and right in the particular case, and hence it is that 
the opposition arises. 


64 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


6. How far the idea of citizenship is pushed is a question of 
degree on which a great deal turns. The actual number of 
citizens may be but a fraction of the whole number of people 
dwelling in a given territory, and while as between these there 
may be a régime of perfect legality and perfect equality, their 
relations to the mass of the people may be as frankly based on 
force as those of any monarchical despotism. Again, within 
the circle of citizens there may be degrees of civic rights. These 
differences can only be justified ethically by the belief in an 
innate and ineradicable difference in capacity to meet civic 
responsibility on the part of members of different classes. In 
proportion as this belief is dissolved by experience the obligations 
of citizenship become universal, and the idea of citizenship as 
an exclusive right merges in that of personality, with rights 
and capacities which all may share simply as human beings. 
According to this conception, which must be understood from 
what has been said above of the social personality, what is good 
in life consists in the bringing out into full bloom of those 
capacities of each individual which help to maintain the common 
life. In this development lies a form of happiness for each, 
which does not conflict, but fits in with and promotes that of 
others, and does not tend to arrest, but to maintain and carry 
forward what may be called the growth of the collective mind— 
-the-expansion of faculty, the growth of achievement. Every 
human being, in proportion as he is normally developed, is able 
to enter into and contribute to the good life so conceived, and 
that he should do so is the sum and substance of all his duties 
to society and all the duties of society to him. But this same 
principle once pushed through, annuls, ethically speaking, the 
distinction between citizen and foreigner, for the foreigner may 
be quite equally capable of the same life, and, if so, is morally 
seized of the same rights and duties, and if, through difference 
of race, he is not always equally capable, still his rights and 
duties cannot fall to zero, but vary only with the degree of 
his incapacity. Hence the fully-developed state in which - 
the principle of personality is rigorously carried through, must” 
also find itself in definite ethical relation to humanity as a 
whole. 

The principles thus summarized are applied with greater or 
less of thoroughness in the forms of state which under varying 
conditions and on a very varying scale have come into existence 
at different periods of history. We find the conception of a 
government resting on civic rights in the city-state of ancient 
Greece and Italy and of medieval Europe; we find it on a larger 


TYPES OF SOCIETY 65 


seale in the country-state of the modern world. The Greco- 
Italian city was more than a clan, a tribe or a village community ; 
it was an organized political society, with a regular government 
administering written laws. But the government was not, in 
relation to the free citizens, in any way despotic; law reigned, 
not the ruler, and sovereign law was not imposed upon the 
people from without, but expressed their own traditional 
character and laid down rules to which they adhered of their 
own free choice.1 The obedience of the Greek to law was a 
moral obedience, the loyalty of free men to an authority which 
they recognized as a moral authority. ‘‘ Though the Lace- 
-dgemonians are free,” says Demaratus to Xerxes, “‘ yet they are 
not free in all things, for over them is set Law as a master, 
whom they fear much more even than thy people fear thee. 
It is certain at least that they do whatsoever that master com- 
mands; and he commands ever the same thing—that is to say, 
he bids them not flee out of battle from any multitude of 
men, but stay in their post and win the victory or lose their 
lite.’’ * 7 

Thus law in the Greek state expressed not the will of a superior 
but a moral authority, freely recognized by free men, and equally 
binding on the ruler and the ruled. On this side the city state 
was contrasted, as the Greeks were fully conscious, with oriental 
despotism. On the other hand, in its many-sided development 
of judicial, executive and legislative organs, it stood far removed 
from the primitive community. The archaic institutions of 
early society—the clan, the phratry and the tribe—gradually 
lost their functions. They ceased to be responsible for their 
members, and the entire execution of justice passed into the 
hands of the state. In the most advanced cities new divisions 
were formed on a territorial basis to replace the old spontaneous 
associations. The individual was responsible before the law 
for his own acts, and—at least as far as he was a free citizen— 
could carve out his own career. He was eligible for the highest 
office, and Aristotle justly defined the good citizen as the man 
who could both rule and be ruled with a view of life at its best; 

1 It is an interesting point, as illustrating the transition from the 
primitive subjection of the popular will to tradition to the later stage of 
civic freedom, that throughout the best period of Greece the established 
law retained much of the primitive sanctity attaching to old custom, so 
that, even at Athens, the Assembly could not finally decide upon changes 
in the law, but had to refer such innovations to a body selected from the 
sworn jurymen for the year, while the proposer of a law, held by them to 
be unjustifiable, was liable to prosecution (see Sidgwick, Huropean Polity, 


pp- 175, 176). 
2? Herodotus, Book VII. chap. civ. (Macaulay Tr.). 


F 


66 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


indeed, in no other political system have public institutions 
offered greater scope for individual initiative, nor have collective 
duties been more generously conceived to meet human needs. 
Aristotle could define a Greek state as an association for main- 
taining a good life for its citizens. The object of political in- 
stitutions was frankly declared to be “ that we may make the 
citizens good.”’ Untroubled by any conflict between the secular 
and the spiritual power, the Greeks could readily conceive a 
political society as an association for all the principal purposes 
of life that are not covered by the smaller association of the 
household. On this side their ideal of the state has never since 
been equalled. 

On the other hand, the idea of association was not pushed 
through. The state was limited to the narrow circle of the 
freemen, and even within the freemen the oligarchies drew sharp 
distinctions. Of the true society which formed the Spartan 
state, only a few thousand Spartiates were really members; the 
Perioeci and Helots had nothing to do with the Spartan con- 
stitution except to conform to its ordinance all The democracies 
opened citizenship to a wider circle, but Mere again the great 
fissure between freeman and slave was maintained. But so far 
as the non-free were concerned the distinctive character of the 
state disappears. The free Athenian demos rules the enslaved 
mass ;1 the Spartiate rules the Perioecus and the Helot no more 
by a principle of right than the Great King his motley crowd of 
subjects. So far as the state includes an unenfranchised popula- 
tion, it abandons the principle of right and falls back on that of 
force. But this was not the only drawback to the Greek zoA1s. 
Its limited scale and the incapacity of the Greeks for a higher 
form of union proved the opportunity of Macedon and the de- 
struction of Greek freedom. At Rome the incapacity of the 
city state to extend its borders and yet maintain the vigour of 
its free constitution led to the extinction of the Republic; the 
Empire could only be consolidated by a bureaucracy. The 
medizval cities escaped slavery. Indeed, as providing a refuge 
for the fugitive serf they played a part in the movement towards 
general freedom. But in other respects they repeated many of 
the features of the Greek 7éAts. We find similar conflicts between 
oligarchic and democratic tendencies. There is the struggle of 
the crafts as against the merchants, and the counter tendency of 
the crafts in their turn, when once ed enfranchised, to become 


1 It is not, however, always sufficiently recognized that the Athenian 
democracy did tend to make the position of slaves more tolerable (see 
below, chap. vii.). 


TYPES OF SOCIETY 67 


exclusive corporations. There are difficulties with feudal nobles 
and with king or emperor from which the Greek state was free, 
and a consequent exaggeration of the troubles of faction and an 
even greater tendency than in Greece to have resort to the 
plenary powers of a tyrannis. There is the same limitation of 
area, and the same difficulty of combined action—witness the 
inertness of the Dutch cities in rendering aid to one another 
against Philip as compared with the determination shown in 
the defence of each city individually. Internal faction and 
external exclusiveness together wrote the doom of the medieval 
city. 


7. The experiment of founding a state was to be tried over 
again in the modern world on a larger scale, when the concen- 
tration of powers in the hands of the monarch had consolidated 
the more advanced nations, while personal freedom had, on the 
whole, been secured for the mass of the people and the religious 
schism had undermined the structure of ecclesiastical authority. 
This concentration meant, in the first instance, a period of 
absolutism, and the reaction against absolutism has filled the 
greater part of the modern period:~“Ethically considered, this 
re-action has two sides. On the one hand, the government.comes 
to recognize that its position is only justified by its function in 
serving public order and. the general happiness. The doctrine 
of the plenary power of the king, emerging though it did readily 
enough from the feudal conception of the supreme over-lord 
when the feudal checks were removed, was nevertheless alien 
to the temper of Europe and the spirit of modern Ethics. The 
doctrine of the ultimate supremacy of the people and the dele- 
gated power of the supreme ruler had held its place in the civil 
law and had never wholly disappeared from the academic world, 
and in the eighteneth century the world of thought was fully 
ready to accept the doctrine that a government holds power only 
by its capacity to serve the people’s needs. On the other side, 
the principle of personality won the successive récognition of one 
right’ after another—right to the protection of the tribunals 
or immunity from arbitrary punishment, freedom in religious ) 
matters, first freedom of conscience, afterwards freedom of 
expression and of public worship, the right to discuss and 
criticize acts of government, the right of meeting and associ- 
ation, ultimately the political right to secure these liberties 
by an indirect share in the government of the country—all 
the rights which, taken together, make the modern state what 
it is. 


68 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


In so far as it rests on these and similar rights, while they in 
turn depend on the guarantees which orderly government can 
give, the modern state depends not on forcible control, but on 
the assent of the great bulk of the governed. Its principle, 
needless to say, is not always consistently carried through. In 
particular, governments have almost everywhere waged war 
with the spirit of nationality where it has come in their way, and 
have preferred to wander far from the principles of equal political 
freedom rather than seek some method of accommodating 
themselves to an inconvenient but very hardy sentiment. 
Otherwise there is no such permanent cause of internal division 
as marred the life of the Greek states. Nor has faction ever 
shown itself so serious in our world. The larger scale of the 
modern state gives it more prospect of. permanence. But here, 
again, its ultimate fate must depend on the conduct of its ex- 
ternal relations. The internecine feuds which ravaged Hellas 
have at times repeated themselves on the larger scale of Europe, 
and threaten now to take in the whole civilized world. And in 
modern, as in ancient, times military ambitions and internal 
liberty are hard to reconcile. The future of the State is bound 
up with Internationalism. If the rivalries and jealousies of the 
civilized nations can be so far overcome as to admit of combined 
action in the cause of peace, there is every reason to expect that 
within each nation the rule of right will be maintained and 
developed. If, on the contrary, wars are to give way only to 
periods of armed peace, each country alike must gradually 
relapse into the rule of a dictatorship. The country state, 
therefore, can hardly be the final word of politics, but if pro- 
gress continues it must consist in the quickening into active life 
of those germs of internationalism which the best statesmen 
of the nineteenth century helped to bring into a precarious 
existence.} 

We have thus distinguished three principles of social union, 
each tending to work itself out in more than one form of social 
organization, according to the varying conditions upon which it 
operates. We have had— 

(1) The Blood Tie, Kinship, and Intermarriage, from which 
sprang the Clan and the Tribe. Of these there were. 
two great divisions : 

(a) The Maternal Clan and its child the Totem. » 
(0) The Paternal Clan, the Patriarchate. —. 
In both classes we find the Joint Household, which may — 
be regarded as at once a clan and a family. 


1 Written in 1905. 


TYPES OF SOCIETY 69 


(2) Despotism—the Principle of Force and Authority. 

(a) Personal—Military or Bureaucratic Despotism. 

(6) Feudal Monarchy. 

(c) The International Empire._ 
(3) The Principle of Citizenship, the Common Good and 

Personal Right, from which spring 

(a) The City State. . 

(0) The National Bintel ee 
The types of social organization that have been sketched 
are not mutually exclusive. A despotic oriental monarchy may 
rule over a hundred thousand village communities, each consist- 
ing of a dozen or a score of patriarchal households in which 
some residual traces of mother-right and totemism may still be 
found. An independent commune may rest on a clan system 
founded on mother-right, and such clans may, like the Iroquois, 
build up a federation resting on assent rather than force, and so 
correspond rather to a state than to a despotic kingdom. What 
-we have distinguished are (1) certain principles of organization 
\which, when they work out unencumbered by other principles, 
form (2) distinguishable types of social structure—types which 
‘we may take as landmarks by reference to which we may place 
other social forms. These types may co-exist as constituent 
parts of a larger order, or may be blended with one another in 
various ways. It follows that we cannot say that one of these 
forms succeeds another in serial order as we ascend the scale of 
culture. The history of society, unfortunately, is not so simple. 
All that we can say with some confidence is that the three 
principles distinguished and the forms of social union arising 
out of them preponderate at successive stages in the order 
named. That is to say, that the lowest form of social organiza- 
tion is the group loosely connected with other groups of the 
same tribe; that at a somewhat higher stage tribal govern- 
ment develops; that above these societies are found organized 
kingdoms; and that the ‘‘state”’ in the true sense is developed 
only among peoples of the highest civilization. There is, as 
it were, a mean point in the scale of social advance belonging 
to each principle, and though it extends far above and far 
below we place the principle in the series by referring it to 
this point. : 





CHAPTER III 
LAW AND JUSTICE 


1. To the civilized man it seems the merest truism to say that 
the business of Government is to make and execute laws, to see 
that crime is suppressed, and that its subjects are maintained in 
possession of their just rights. Not only so, but the broad lines 
upon which justice is administered are to him so familiar and 
seem so clearly marked out by reason and common sense that if 
he were to think of their origin at all he would naturally imagine 
that here, if anywhere, we had to do with simple and elementary 
moral ideas, implanted in men by nature, and needing no training 
nor experience to perfect them. Thus, what could be more 
obvious, to begin with, than the distinction of civil and criminal 
justice? A may trespass upon the rights of B, but he may do 
so without fraud, violence, or any criminal intent. In such 
cases the loss suffered by B must be made good, but no further 
punishment should fall upon A. That is, there is ground for a 
civil action. Or, on the other hand, in injuring B, A may have 
committed an offence against the social order. In that case he 
must be punished as a criminal, and is not to escape merely by 
making good the loss inflicted on B. He has offended society, 
and society insists on punishing him. But, further, if A is a 
wrong-doer, it must be proved that he is a responsible agent. 
He must have done wrong with intention, and, if so, he alone 
ought to suffer. Socially, no doubt, his fall must affect his 
innocent wife and children, but this is a regrettable result, not 
a consequence which the law goes about to inflict. Lastly, 
whether in a civil or criminal case, the function of the law is to 
set up an impartial authority, before whom the question is 
argued. Both sides are heard. Evidence is cited, and witnesses 
called, whose testimony the court is free to sift and weigh. 
Formalities and rules have to be observed, but apart, perhaps, 
from some which are archaic, they are devised mainly as safe- 
guards against wrongful decisions, and the real business of the 
inquiry is to get at truth as to the material facts. In the end, 
the decision being given, the court can freely use the executive 
power of Government to enforce it. : 

70 


| 


. 


LAW AND JUSTICE 71 


Elementary as all this sounds, it is, historically speaking, the 
result of a long evolution. The distinction between civil and 
criminal law, the principle of strictly individual responsibility, 
the distinction between the intentional and the unintentional, 
the conception of the court as an impartial authority to try’ 
the merits of the case, the exclusive reliance on evidence and 
testimony, the preference of material to formal rectitude, the 
execution of the court’s decision by a public force—all are- 
matters very imperfectly understood by primitive peoples, and 
their definite establishment is the result of a slow historical 
process. Perhaps no other department of comparative ethics 
gives so vivid an idea of the difficulty which humanity has 
found in establishing the simple elements of a just social order. 


2. The growth of law and justice is pretty closely connected in 
its several stages with the forms of social organization that have 
been described. In some of the lower races there is, it would 
_ appear, scarcely anything that is strictly to be called the adminis- 
‘tration of justice. Private wrongs are revenged by private 
individuals, and any one whom they can get to help them. The 
neighbours interfere in the least possible degree, and how far a 
man’s family, or the wider group to which he belongs, will stand 
by him, is a question which is decided in each particular case 
as its own merits, or the inclinations of those concerned, direct. 


1 Take as an example the Andamanese, who live in small communities 
numbering from twenty to fifty individuals, and have no distinct institu- 
tions for the maintenance of order or the settlement of disputes. Each 
group, indeed, has a chief, but his powers are extremely limited, extending 
to little beyond the right of calling the people together and exercising over 
them what influence he can. There is no form of covenant, no oath, no 
form of trial, no ordeal. Justice is left altogether to the aggrieved party, 
who shoots an arrow at his enemy or throws a burning faggot at him, the 
neighbours playing their part in the matter by running away until the 
quarrel is over, which at any rate prevents the spread of the mischief. 
The law of vengeance is not developed. A relative may avenge the death 
of a murdered man, but it is not necessary that anything should happen. 
The neighbours are afraid of the murderer, and he finds it desirable to 
absent himself for a while. Not uncommonly a man will show his resent- 
ment, not by punishing the wrong-doer, but by destroying all the property 
that he can lay hands upon, including his own. The chief’s property alone 
will be respected. In other words, the Andaman islander, like the Malay, 
is apt to run amok, and such men are not resisted because they are held 
to be possessed. Conjugal fidelity among this monogamous people is 
enforced by the husband, but in punishing the guilty party he runs the 
risk of retaliation. There appears, however, says Mr. Man, to be an 
understanding that the greater the provocation offered, the less is the risk 
incurred by the injured person or his friends, in avenging the wrong—a 
sentiment which very aptly characterizes the degree in which justice is 
recognized as a public matter at this stage of social development. There 
is no definite redress, but an injured man may hope to carry the support 


72 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


But even at a very low stage this uncertain and fitful action 
begins to take more definite shape. There are two possible 
lines of development, and it will be convenient to begin by tracing 
them separately, though in actual fact they are intertwined. 
. On the one hand, the method of self-redress may be organized 
\and reduced to system under a regular code of recognized custom. 
,On the other, the maintenance of order, the settlement of disputes, 
‘the punishment of offences, and the redress of wrongs may be 
undertaken, partially or completely as the case may be, by the 
community acting through its leading men, its chief, or, finally, 
through a regularly constituted organ for the administration of 
justice. 


y: 3. As a system-vengeance, like other systems, is a product 
of development. On the whole we hear less of it among the most 
‘primitive’? men than among those which stand somewhat 
higher. Many of the jungle people of Asia, living under the 
simplest conditions possible, appear to be peaceful, gentle folk, 
quarrelling and fighting but little among themselves, and if they 
have no regular law or government, scarcely seeming to feel the 
need.1 In such little groups, where society can hardly be said 
to extend beyond the circle of the near kin, all well known to 
one another and standing in definite personal relations, the con- 


ee ene ee ee rn tere fein Stes ai tem arte cn al lle te ea pe a 





of the neighbours with him in rough proportion to the strength of his 
case. Injuries done by a member of another tribe lead to more regular 
feuds and are avenged, if possible, by a night attack upon the neighbouring 
camp, which, if successful, results in the slaughter of the males and the 
destruction or appropriation of the property of the vanquished. The 
women of the enemy, it may be noted, are not deliberately killed; at any 
rate, their death is not, as among some more advanced peoples, a matter 
for boasting; and the child captive would be treated kindly with a view 
to its adoption by the captors’ tribe. Cannibalism, the frequent con- 
comitant of savage warfare, is held in horror, but is attributed by the 
southern Andamanese to the inhabitants of the northern island (EK. H. 
Man, Journal of the Anthropological Institute, vol. xii. p. 108 seq.). 

1 Thus the Punans of Borneo, who support themselves on the wild 
products of the jungle and have no house, but a shelter of palm leaves 
supported on sticks, live in small communities of twenty to thirty adults, 
for the most part near relatives, under the mild and unauthoritative 
leadership of one of the older men. ‘‘ He dispenses no substantial punish- 
ments,’’ and if one or more of his band are displeased with him, they 
withdraw and form another band. The Punan will avenge the murder 
of a relative, but he seems rarely to fight with other Punans, unless insti- 
gated by the more civilized village people with whom he maintains relations 
(Hose and McDougall, ii. 180-183). Most of the Eskimo, and some other 


peoples of the North-West, are very peaceable. Among the Point Barrow ~ 


Eskimo, Murdoch witnessed no quarrel in two years residence (R. B. E., 
1887, p. 41). In some cases, among the Western Eskimo, quarrels are 
settled by a boxing match (Bancroft, p. 65). 


— 


LAW AND JUSTICE 73 


_ sequences of any quarrel must depend mainly on the character 
of individuals and particularly on the resoluteness-or weakness 
of the older men who take the lead. Such societies, of course, 
have their customs, which are doubtless felt as binding by their 
members, but if we mean by law a body of rules enforced by an 
authority independent of personal ties of kinship and friend- 
ship, such an institution is not compatible with their social 
organization. They may be more fairly characterized negatively 
by saying that they know no law in our sense, than positively 
by attributing to them the custom of self-redress. < 

‘Other tribes. equally primitive are-less peaceable. Among 
the Lower Californians ‘‘every man is his Own master and 
administers justice in the form of vengeance as best he is able,1 
Among the Botocudos, Zu Wied gives a graphic account of the 
rise of a quarrel—how it begins, perhaps, with a father striking 
a child, how its mother rushes to protect it, he turns upon her 
and her brother comes to her help. Presently both families are 
engaged with the relatives on both sides, and the affair assumes 
the proportions of a feud.? It is, in fact, through the bond of © 
kindred that retaliation develops into a system, and we find it 
at its height where a number of kindreds live together, inter- 
marrying, forming one society, even recognizing a common 
government for certain purposes, but each retaining jealously 
the right of protecting its members. The leading characteristics 
of this stage of development are two—(1) that redress is obtained 
by retaliation, and (2) that owing to the solidarity of the family 
the sufferer will find support in obtaining the redress that he — 
seeks. The individudl man, woman or child no longer stands 
by himself or herself, but can count with considerable certainty 
on the protection of his relatives, who are bound to avenge a 
wrong done to him, or to stand by him in exacting vengeance, 
by every tie of honour and religion. Thus vengeance develops ” 
into the blood feud. ‘*‘ He that sheddeth man’s blood, by man 
shall his blood be shed,” is the earliest law given in the Old 
_ Testament, and on this point the Old Testament may be said to 
be a faithful reflection of the historical facts. 

Though the blood feud is an expression of vengeance, this 
vengeance is by no means wholly without regulations and rules 
of its own. There is a rough justice recognizable in its working, 
though it is not the justice of an impartial third person surveying 
the facts asa whole. There is no question of a just judge render- 
ing each man his due, but rather of a united kin sympathizing 
with the resentment of an injured relation when expressing itself in 

1 Bancroft, p. 564. 2 Zu Wied, vol. ii. p. 43. 


74 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


certain traditional forms. Justice as we understand it—the ren- 
dering to each man his due as judged by an impartial authority— 
is not distinctly conceived as a social duty in primitive ethics, 
and that is what, morally speaking, differentiates the primitive 
ethical consciousness from the ethical consciousness at a higher 
stage of development. Yet primitive ethics works upon rules 
in which a certain measure of justice is embodied. Thus, in the 
first. place, custom prescribes certain rules of retaliation which 
are recognized as right and proper and have the approval of the 
neighbours and clansmen. The simplest and earliest of these 
rules is the famous Lex Talionis, ““ An eye for an eye, and a 
tooth for a tooth,” familiar to us from the chapter of Exodus, 
but far earlier than Exodus in its first formulation. We find it, 
like many other primitive rules of law, in the recently discovered 
code of King Hammurabi,! which is earlier than the Book of the 
Covenant perhaps by 1300 years, and we find it at the present 
day among people sociologically at an earlier stage of develop- 
ment than the Babylonians of the third millennium before Christ. 
We find it applicable to bodily injuries,? to breaches of the 


a 


marriage law,? and perhaps we may say in the rules of the two- 


fold restitution for theft and in the symbolic form of mutilating 
the offending member even to the case of offences against pro- 
perty.* In some cases the idea of exact retaliation is carried 
out with the utmost literalness—a grotesque literalness some- 
times, as when a man who has killed another by falling on him 
from a tree is himself put to death by exactly the same method— 
a relation of the deceased solemnly mounting the tree and, much 
one would say at his own risk, descending upon the offender.® 
More often, of course, vengeance is simpler. Stripes, mutilation 
or death are inflicted without any attempt to imitate the original 

1 Hammurabi, § 195. If a man has struck his father, his hands one 
shall cut off. 

196. If a man has caused the loss of a patrician’s eye, his eye one shall 


cause to be lost. 
197. If he has shattered a patrician’s limb, one shall shatter his limb. 


200. If a man has made the tooth of a man that is his equal to fall out, — 


one shall make his tooth fall out, ete. 
2 See instances in Post, 11. 240, 241. 
3’ The adulterer has to yield his own wife to the injured husband (oc. cit., 
cf. Waitz, iv. 361). 
‘The thief loses eye or hand. Similarly the adulterer or ravisher may 
be castrated—and with this we may perhaps compare the punishment of 
the unchaste wife by prostitution, as among the Kamilaroi (Howitt, p. 207). 


Cf. Fraser, T'ribes of N. S. Wales, p. 39. The perjurer loses his tongue © 


or the “‘ schwurfinger ”’ (Post, J. c.). 

5 In the Leges Henrici, Pollock and Maitland, vol. il. pp. 470, 471. 
Mutilation is punished by retaliation among the Barea and Kunama, the 
Whydah, Bogos, and Congo people (Post, ii. 241). 


LAW AND JUSTICE 75 


offence, though there may very well be a grading of the vengeance 
in proportion to the original wrong. The homicide is slain, the 
adulterer speared, beaten, or mutilated, the thief slain, enslaved 
or forced to make restitution, the defaulting debtor enslaved or 
flogged.1 


4. But at a fairly early stage in the growth of social order a 
fresh principle is introduced tending to mitigate the blood feud 
and so maintain peace and harmony. For the special vice of the 
system of retaliation is that it provides no machinery for bring- 
ing the quarrel to an end. If one of the Bear totem is killed by 
a Hawk, the Hawk must be killed by one of the Bears, but it by 
no means follows that this will end the matter, for the Hawks 
may now stand by their murdered clansman and take the life of 
a second Bear in revenge, and so the game goes on, and we have 
a true course of vendetta. Accordingly, peaceable souls, with a 
view to the welfare of both families, perhaps with the broader 
view of happiness and harmony within the community, intervene 
with a suggestion of peace. Let the injured Bears take com- 
pensation in another form, let them take cattle or other things 
to make good the loss of the pair of hands which served them. 
In a word, let the payment of damages be a salve to vindictive 
feelings. In that way the incident may came to an end and 
peace will reign.2 When such a practice becomes a customary 


1 e.g. among the Cherokees the defaulting debtor was tied to a tree and 
flogged (Waitz, iii. 131). In other tribes disputes as to money matters 
were regulated by arbitrators chosen by the conflicting parties. Those 
who were prevented by illness or any real obstacle from paying their 
debts, were not compelled to do so, but those who could pay and did not 
fell into general contempt. 

2 Among the Australians we have a still simpler and ruder form of 
atonement, suited to the low economic development of the people. The 
offender must give satisfaction in kind, e. g. having injured a man he must. 
submit himself to a blow on the head or a spear thrust. Thus, among 
the Whayook, should a man wound a fellow tribesman, custom requires 
him to present himself to the sufferer for a similar wound (Curr, The 
Australian Race, vol. i. p. 339). Among the Koynup and Etecup he must 
allow himself to be speared on the leg (2b., p. 349). Among the Milya 
Uppa any “complaint ” is wiped out by the offender allowing the sufferer 
to strike him on his head (J. A. Reid, in Curr, vol. ii. p. 179). Similarly 
among the Geawegal, Waimbio, Wurunjerri, etc. In many cases, too, 
wrongs by a member of one local group upon another are wiped out by 
the offender standing a spear-throwing ordeal in the presence of both 
parties; e.g. among the Yuin (Howitt, p. 342, where, though it was a 
case of homicide, the avengers were satisfied with the first drawing of 
blood). Generally Messrs. Spencer and Gillen remark that a savage re- 
gards any offence as wiped out by a suitable proffer of atonement (Northern 
Tribes, p. 31). This form of atonement leads, as we shall see later, to a 
certain amount of public or quasi-public intervention. 





76 MORALS IN EVOLUTION ge 


hip ee 


a institution we enter upon the stage-of composition_for offences, 


a stage peculiarly characteristic of the settling down of barbarous 
tribes into a peaceable and relatively civilized state, and especially 
of the growth of the power of a chief whose influence~is- often 
exerted to enforce the expedient of composition upon a reluctant 
and revengeful family.t_ As the institution takes shape a regular 
tariff is introduced, somuch for an injury, so much for the loss 
of an eye, so much for a life. Often a distinction between classes 
of crime appears. For some it is the rule that composition 
should be accepted. Others are recognized as too grave to be 
washed out except by blood. Thus, among the German tribes, 
murder and rape excited blood revenge, while other injuries were 
punishable by fine, and the fine is significantly called “ faida,”’ 
as being the feud commuted for money.? The distinction 
lasted into the Middle Ages, even in a period when the fine or a 
part of it went to the king. Our Leges Henrici still distinguish 
emendable offences, in which sacrilege and wilful homicide with- 
out treachery are included, from unemendable offences such as 
housebreaking, arson, open theft, aggravated homicide, treason 
against one’s lord, and breach of the church’s or the king’s peace.® 
These are crimes which in the Anglo-Saxon term had no bot— 
no bét or money payment atoned for them—they were bot-less, 
boot-less. Even when the bét was payable it stood at first at 
the discretion of the injured family to accept or reject it, and we 
find the Germanic codes in the early Middle Ages setting them- 
selves to insist on its acceptance as a means of keeping the peace.* 
If the fine is not forthcoming, of course the feud holds. 

1 But it originates much earlier. We do not, indeed, find it except in 
the Australian form of the expiatory encounter among the Lower Hunters, 
but we have twenty-five instances among the Higher Hunters (Simpler 
Peoples, p. 80). The principle extends to tribes standing as low as the 
Central Californians, e.g. among the Patawat, the murder of a man was 
punished by a fine of shell money—ten strings for a man, five for a squaw 
(Powers, p. 98). 

2 Waitz, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte, i. 437, who, however, denies 
that the fine was a merely buying off of revenge. 

* Post, Afrikanische Jurisprudenz, ii. 30, gives a list of ten African 
peoples in which composition is allowed for all offences. In three others 
it is allowed for all cases except the gravest, such as murder; among the 
Kimbundas, for all except sorcery and treason; among the Barolong for 
all except rebellion, and among the Kaffirs for all except treason, sorcery, 
and sometimes murder. In medizeval England there was much local 
variation in the fines. At Lewes the fine for bloodshed was 7/4, for 
adultery 8/4, the man paying the king, the woman the archbishop. In 
Shropshire the fine for bloodshed was 40/-. In Worcestershire rape was 
not emendable (Pollock and Maitland, ii. 457). 

4 Charlemagne’s capitulary of 802 forbids the kin to increase the evil 


by refusing peace to the manslayer who craves it (Jenks, Law and Politics, 
p. 102). In England, down to the ninth and tenth centuries, the aggressor 


LAW AND JUSTICE 17 


But when injuries are being assessed, not only must there be 
a distinction between the injuries themselves, but also between 
the persons injured. There must be a distinction of rank, age, 
sex; a free-born man is worth more than a slave, a grown-up 
person than a child, generally speaking a man than a woman, a 
chief or person of rank than a free man. And so we have the 
system of “ wergilds”’ familiar to us in the early stages of our 
own history,! and again recognizable in the code of Hammurabi.’ 





might elect to bear the blood feud, but by an ordinance of Alfred, the 
injured party might have the help of the ealdorman to enforce payment 
(Pollock and Maitland, i. 47). 

1 Among the Germanic peoples, in the early medieval period, the 
wergild of a noble was generally double that of a free man. A post in 
the King’s service trebled the wergild of the official’s hereditary rank. 
The Liti (Hérige) had, as a rule, half the wer of free men, whilst slaves, 
according to strict principle had none, but only a valuation. In fact, 
however, some barbarian codes assigned them half the wer of a litus 
(Schréder, pp. 345, 346). 

? Hammurabi illustrates two subsidiary points. (1) An offence against 
a man of higher rank may be unemendable (7. e. punished by retaliation), 
while the same offence against a man of lowerrankis commutable. (2) The 
_ rank of the aggressor may influence the punishment as well as that of the 
sufferer. Injuries to eye or limb of a patrician are punished by retalia- 
tion (sections 196, 197), but in section 198, “‘ If he has caused a poor man 
to lose his eye or shattered a plebeian’s limb, he shall pay one mina of 
silver.” Further, by section 199, the slave has no wer—for the same injury 
the aggressor “shall pay half his price.”” Similarly for the loss of a tooth 
(sections 200, 201). The provisions for assault and homicide are as follows— 

202. If a man has struck the strength of a man who is great above 
him, he shall be struck in the assembly with sixty strokes of a cow-hide 
whip. 

203. If a man of gentle birth has struck the privates of a man of gentle 
birth, who is like himself, he shall pay one mina of silver. 

204. If a poor man has struck the strength of a plebeian, he shall pay 
ten shekels of silver. 

205. If a patrician’s servant has struck the strength of a free man, one 
shall cut off his ear. 

206. If a man has struck a man in a quarrel, and has caused him a 
wound, that man shall swear, “‘I do not strike him knowing,” and shall 
answer for the doctor. 

207. If he has died of his blows, he shall swear, and if he be of gentle 
_ birth he shall pay half a mina of silver. 

208. If he be the son of a plebeian, he shall pay one-third of a mina of 
silver. 

209. If a man has struck a patrician’s daughter and caused her to drop 
what is in her womb, he shall pay ten shekels of silver for what was in 
her womb. 

210. If that woman has died, one shall put to death his daughter. 

211. If the daughter of a plebeian through his blows he has caused to 
drop that which is in her womb, he shall pay five shekels of silver. 

212. If that woman has died, he shall pay half a mina of silver. 

213. If he has struck a patrician’s maidservant and caused her to drop 
that which is in her womb, he shall pay two shekels of silver. 

214. If that maidservant has died, he shall pay one-third of a mina of 
silver. 


78 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


In one form or another the system of composition prevails or 
has prevailed almost to this day over a great part of the barbaric 
world, among the North American Indians,! in the Malay Archi- 
pelago,? in New Guinea, among the Indian hill tribes, among the 
Calmucks and Kirghis of the steppes of Asia, among the rude 
tribes of the Caucasus, the Bedouin of the Arabian desert, the 
Somali of East Africa, the negroes of the West Coast, the Congo 
folk of the interior, the Kaffirs and Basutos of the South.? 


or compounded by money payments. In either method a rough 
justice is embodied, but it is justice enforced by the strong hand. 
Even graver differences separating barbaric vengeance from 
civilized justice have now to be mentioned. These differences are 


ce Organized vengeance, then, may be exacted by retaliation 





218. If the doctor has treated a patrician for a severe wound with a 
lancet of bronze and has caused that patrician to die, or has opened an 
abscess of the eye for a patrician with the bronze lancet and has caused 
the loss of the patrician’s eye, one shall cut off his hands. 

219. If a doctor has treated the severe wound of a slave of a poor man 
with a bronze lancet and has caused his death, he shall render slave for 
slave. 

220. If he has opened his abscess with a bronze lancet and has made him 
lose his eye, he shall pay money, half his price. 

1 Kohler, Zeitschrift fur vergl. Rechtswissenschaft, 1897, pp. 406, 407; 
Alvord in Schoolcraft, v. 653; Morgan, League of the Iroquois, 331, 332. 
(Failing a present of a belt of white wampum the family of the deceased 
appointed an avenger.) 

2? Waitz, v. p. i. 143. The wergild varies from 200 to 1000 guiden, 
according to the rank of the dead man. In case of poison, the poisoner 
becomes the slave of the family. A paramour may be enslaved by the 
husband if taken in the act, but if the matter is brought before a court, 
money compensation must be accepted. 

3 Post, il. 256, 257. In the lower grades of culture the practice 
extends, as might be supposed, with the economic development. Com- 
paring Composition with Retaliation, we find the following figures (the 
expiatory encounters are omitted. The two columns do not represent 
separate individual cases, composition and retaliation usually being 
optional alternatives )— 


Retaliation. Composition. 
Lower Hunters Re mere ARN. 44 6 
Higher hoarse nan niet oien 50 25 
Incipient Agriculture . . ... Li 14 
PRBUOTALOM I Mie Mriianul te cists 2 ually 9 10 
PAOVICU PON Te Gi Net ehw icy scllannn ag 59 43 
acheriPastoral iin au) ley) ahi 8 9 
Higher Agriculture . . ... 43 49 


(Simpler Peoples, p. 80). 


As public justice develops, composition is first enforced. Then it takes 
the form of the assignment of a fine to the injured party by a court. Then 
all compounding is suppressed and even becomes criminal. A court may 
award civil damages for the wrong, but will inflict his due punishment on 
the offender in addition. 


LAW AND JUSTICE 79 


‘inherent in the nature of the social organization upon which the »* 
blood feud rests. For the blood feud is retribution exercised by 
.@ family upon a family; it rests upon the support which each 
individual can count upon from his own immediate relations, 
possibly from his whole clan; it rests, in a word, upon the 
solidarity of the kindred. But the effect of this solidarity upon 
the working of retributive justice is by no means wholly favour- 
able. In the first place, it has the effect that the lives of mem- ' 
bers of other clans are held indifferent. A perfect illustration is 
afforded by the Angami Nagas, a tribe of the north-east frontier 
_ of India who live in villages composed of two or more “ khels,”’ 
as their clans are called, which, though living side by side and 
intermarrying, are for purposes of defence independent com- 
munities. A hostile tribe may descend upon the village and 
massacre all the members of one “ khel ” while the other “ khels ”’ 
sleep peacefully in their beds and do not raise hand or foot to 
protect their neighbours. This is cold-blooded, but it is not 
without a certain reason. The exterminated “ khel”’ has in- 
curred a feud from which the others are free. If they rise in 
its defence they not only incur the danger of the present fight, 
but they also involve themselves in the permanent feud.1 Next, 
in so far as justice rests on the blood feud, and the blood feud is is 
had URL 
of the nature of a private war between distinct families or clans, 
it follows that offences within the clan are a matter for the clan 
only and not for society as a whole. As a rule we hear little 
about them, partly because, no doubt, they are rarer,” but mainly 
because they do not excite a feud and do not, therefore, affect the 
social order as a whole. But that they stand in quite a different 
category from offences by an outsider upon a fellow clansman is 
clear from many instances. In some the offender may escape 
very lightly. Thus, among the Iroquois and Delaware, the kin 
would exact a fine, and failing a fine, blood-vengeance from a 
murderer, but if a man murdered one of his own relations, he 
escaped without much difficulty, for the family, who alone have 
the right to take revenge, do not choose to deprive their race of 
two members at once. They rather endeavour to bring about a 
reconciliation and even justify the deed. On the other hand, 
among the Thlinkeets, while murder by a non-clansman is a 


1 Godden, J. A. J., xxvi. 167. Similarly in contemporary Africa, so 
far as blood revenge holds, the slaying of any one outside the clan is no 
more regarded as wrong than the killing of an enemy in battle among us 
(Post, Afrikanische J urisprudenz, i. 60). 

‘No Omaha ever slew his “ affinity,” says Dorsey (Omaha Sociology, 
p. 369). 
3 Loskiel, p. 21. 


80 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


, 


~ matter for vengeance or composition, a disgraceful act would be 
felt so keenly by the man’s own family, that he might be degraded 
or killed for it. Here, then, is something like impartial justice 
within the kindred, but not beyond it. In some cases the 
kindred may intervene to protect themselves. Thus, among the 
Topanaz, if a man has killed a tribesman, accidentally or not, his 
kinsmen take him to those of the slain man, who strangle him. 
The two parties then eat together and the affair is settled. The 
motive is explained by the fact that if the murderer flies, one of 
his near kindred must atone for him.? The patria potestas is, 
of course, the most widely spread case of unrestrained power 
within a circle of kindred.® 

Apart from more direct punishment, the kindred or their head 
have the effective weapon of expulsion. This is the more serious, 
because when there is no other protection than that of his relatives, 
it leaves a man defenceless. An illustration may be drawn from 
the early history of Mohammed’s teaching, when the Korais, who 
found that Mohammed’s gospel was very inimical to their gains, 
wanted above all things to put him out of the way and made the 
most strenuous efforts to induce Mohammed’s uncle, who was 
head of the clan, to disown him. Had the uncle consented, 
Mohammed would have been left without protection and might 
have been dispatched by any one without fear of consequences, 
but till the death of the uncle the clan stood by him; and the 
leading men of Mecca, powerful as they were, were not bold 


1 Swanton, p. 427. 

2 Eschwege, vol. i. p. 221. Compare the action of the family among the 
Creeks (Bartram, Jrs. American Ethnol. Socy., 1853, pp. 66-67). An 
interesting case is recorded by Mr. Teit (Jesup Expedition, p. 560) among 
the Shushwap. A man is killed by two of his relations on the ground that 
‘““he is conducting himself in such a way that very soon some one will. 
kill him. Then we shall have to avenge his death.” They apply the 
homeeopathic remedy publicly and without interference—people remarking 
that he isa bad man. ‘“ His relations wish to kill him, he belongs to them 
and has nothing to do with us.’”” However, the conscience of the murderers 
was clearly not easy, for they proceed to challenge every one, and an old 
woman gets up and says, “‘ You are not content with killing your relation 
but also boast and challenge us,’’ whereupon the murderers fled. 

3 But it must be noted, conversely, that the murder of a parent might 
excite general horror and even punishment at the hands of unconnected 
people. Thus, among the Campas, who had no regular government or 
law, Urquhart says: “‘It must not be supposed that crime is on this 
account allowed to go unpunished,” and he mentions the case of a man 
who had murdered his mother and fled—‘‘ At every hamlet the same 
indignation was expressed. Not an Indian but would kill him on sight” 
(Scottish Geogr. Magazine, 1893, p. 349). A similar sentiment is hinted 
at with regard to a man who gambled away wife and children among the 
porate but the authenticity is doubtful (Morice, Z7'rs. Canadian Institute, 

893, p. 79). 


LAW AND JUSTICE 81 


_ enough to take upon themselves a blood feud with Mohammed’s 
family! The fear of the blood feud is the great restraint upon 
. disorder in primitive society, and, conversely, he whose death will 
excite no blood feud has no legal protection. 

So far the negative side of clan justice. The positive side has 
peculiarities not less startling to the modern mind, for since it 
is a member of one body who has done a wrong to a member 
of another body, the whole body to which the offending member 
belongs may be held responsible by the whole body to which 
the injured member belongs; and it is not merely the original 
criminal who may be punished, but logically any member of his 
family may serve as a substitute. Responsibility is collective, 
and therefore also vicarious. Sometimes the whole family of the 
offender is destroyed with him.2 Sometimes any relation of the 
offender may suffer for him vicariously. John, who has done 
the deed, being out of reach, primitive vengeance is quite satisfied 
with the life of Thomas, his son, or brother, or cousin. Just as 
in the blindness of warfare the treacherous act of an enemy is 
generalized and perhaps avenged in the next battle by a retalia- 
tion which does not stay to ask whether it is falling on the 
innocent or the guilty, soin the primitive blood feud. The wrong 
done is the act of the family or clan to which the aggressor 
belongs, and may be avenged on any member of that family or 


1 Palmer, Introduction to the Koran, pp. 24, 25. Among African peoples 
there is, generally speaking, no blood feud for homicide within the clan. 
But among the South-Western Arabs the parricide is put to death, and 
for fratricide the father may put the offender to death or demand the 
blood price (Post, A. J.,i. 63). Among the Bogos the slayer of brother or 
father would be killed on the spot if taken. But if he escapes, his fate 
will depend on the question whether his victim has or has not left children. 
If so, they will take up the feud. If not, he can make his peace without 
payment, and then inherit his brother’s property and widow (7b., ii. 60). 
In the Malay region the murder of a relative is dishonouring, but has no 
money penalty (Waitz, v. 1, 149). For illustrations of the variety of 
customs under this head, see Steinmetz, ii. 153-176. Ostracism, culminat- 
ing in outlawry, is perhaps the only punishment known to the Seri Indians. 
The victim might be left to perish unless reinstated by a display of prowess 
or generosity (McGee, R. B. H., xvii. 273). Expulsion from the clan was 
the only punishment among the Santals, but other clans would not take 
the outcast in, so that his position was hopeless. Minor offences might be 
compounded by giving a feast (Hunter, Indian Empire, p. 73, and Rural 
Bengal, p. 205). 

2 e.g. among the Kaffirs, at Loango, and among the Barolong, the 
relatives are held responsible for payment by the accusers, and on the 
Gold Coast the relatives of the sorcerer are slain or enslaved along with 
him (Post, 4. J., i. 46). Among some North American Indians the family 
and the whole tribe were held responsible for a murder committed by one 
of them (Waitz, iii. 132). In Anglo-Saxon law it was possible for a family 

_to be enslaved for a theft by the father (Pollock and Maitland, i. 56). 


G 


82 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


clan. Sometimes the retaliation is made more specific by a fresh 
application of the Lex T'alionis, and to the rule “ eye for eye,” 
there is the pendant “‘ son for son, daughter for daughter, slave for 
slave, ox for ox.”’ You have slain my son? Then the true and 
just retribution is that I should slay yours.? It is my daughter 
‘who is slain? Then it is with your daughter that you must pay 
for her. Sometimes vengeance is specially directed against the 
chief as representing the clan.? Sometimes it may be visited on 
any male, or even on any adult member of the clan, children 
alone being excluded. Sometimes this last shred of humanity is 
torn away. The principle is pushed to its furthest and most 


1 For instances, see Post, Grundriss, i. 230 ff. Prof. Tylor instances 
the Bedouin, Australians, South Sea Islanders, and Kaffirs, as peoples 
among whom the blood feud involved the whole clan (Contemp. Review, 
1873, p. 59). In some cases the wergild involved the slaying of several 
persons for one. Thus, by Anglo-Saxon law, six ceorls must die for 
one thegn (Pollock and Maitland, ii. 450). Edmund set himself to 
suppress feuds, forbidding attacks on the kindred unless they harbour the 
homicide. Mohammedan law, while admitting retaliation, restricts it to the 
offender (Post, loc. cit.). But the kin are liable for money composition 
(Dareste, p. 64). In many African tribes a creditor will seize and sell 
as a slave any relation of the debtor’s whom he can find, or even any 
member of the same town. It is not surprising to learn that this method 
of distraint is a fruitful source of war (Post, A. J., ii. 140). A still 
wilder development of vicarious revenge is found in the Gazelle Peninsula 
among the Papuas, where the husband whose wife has been stolen goes into 
the bush and kills the first man he meets. This man’s kindred do the same 
thing, and the process is repeated till the stroke lights upon the original 
offender, whose goods have to pay all the damage (Kohler, Z. d. vgl. 
Rechtsw., 1900, p. 381). Cf. a similar practice in 8. Guinea (Post, A. J., 
ii. 22). 

2 The most astonishing case is in the treatment of the builder in the 
codes of Hammurabi, 229: ‘‘ If a builder has built a house for a man and 
has not made strong his work, and the house he built has fallen, and he 
has caused the death of the owner of the house, that builder shall be put 
to death. 

230. If he has caused the son of the owner of the house to die, one shall 
put to death the son of that builder. 

231. If he has caused the slave of the owner of the house to die, he 
shall give slave for slave to the owner of the’ house.”? Though barbaric, 
these sections might have a use if suitably posted in modern suburbs. - 

3 Or the father or elder brother may be the appropriate victim. Among 
the Dieri, if a man killed another unintentionally in a fight, his elder brother 
or father will be slain some night by a Pinya or secretly formed party of 
avengers. He himself will only suffer if he have no such relative (Gason, 
in Brough Smyth, vol. i. p. 129). In West Victoria a man’s brother or 
nearest male relative was responsible for the appearance of a man sum- 
moned to stand the spear-throwing ordeal, and if he fails to appear, may be 
attacked with boomerangs (Dawson, Australian Aborigines, p. 76). Collins 
(History of N. S. Wales, p. 321) relates a complicated vendetta, a minor — 
incident in which is that a widow revenges herself on her husband’s 
murderer by killing a little girl related to him and is not molested, but 
afterwards lives with the murderer until he is killed by one of her deceased 
husband’s friends. 


LAW AND JUSTICE 83 


revolting development among the head-hunting tribes common in 
South-East Asia, in which magical ideas combine with those of 
revenge, and the skull of the enemy has a potency of its own which 
makes its possession desirable in itself. The head of a child or 
woman of the hostile body is no less coveted an object than that 
of the fighting warrior, and is probably easier to obtain. When 
the principle of composition arises collective responsibility is re- 
duced, by a less barbarous logic, to a common pecuniary liability. 
The clan are collectively responsible for the blood money due 
from a member, and by the same logic they are the collective 
recipients of blood money due to any member.t And as with 
' blood money so with other debts.2. There is a collective liability— 
a conception which in this softened form has its uses in the social 
order, and is in fact enforced and applied to the commune— 
though in right it belongs rather to the clan—by many Oriental 
Governments.® 


6. Further, with the theory of collective responsibility goes 
almost necessarily the failure to distinguish between accident 
and design. In the ethics of organized vengeance the real 
gravamen of a charge against an aggressor is that he has done an 
injury. How he did the injury, whether of set purpose or by 
accident, is a matter of less moment. My son, or brother, or 
cousin, or clansman, is killed; that is enough for me; I must 
have some satisfaction out of the man who did it, and, what is 


1 e.g. among the Bogos and Bedouin (Post, i. 253), and compare Post, 
A. J., i. 45 and ii. 35. For collective claims on the blood money, cf. 
Tacitus, Germania (ap. G. Waitz, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte, i. 32), 
“recipitque satisfactionem universa domus.”’ 

2 e.g. at Great Bassam (Post, A. J., i. 45). Among the Yoruba, Tshi, 
and Ewe speaking peoples, collective responsibility which formerly applied 
generally is now restricted to debts (Ellis, Yoruba-speaking Peoples, 299). 
“ne Waitz, iv. 306. In Yucatan the whole family is responsible for 

ebt. 

$ And elsewhere; e.g. at Sierra Leone and in several other parts of 
Africa, responsibility for debt extends to the Commune (Post, A. J., i. 
75). In the Malay constitution the family is responsible for its members, 
the sukw (clan) for its families, the village for its sukus, the district for its 
villages (Waitz, v. i. 141). The principles of collective responsibility is 
found in all economic grades of uncivilized society, but only, so far as our 
tables go, in a minority of instances (Simpler Peoples, p. 80). On the 
other hand, it is but rarely that we hear specifically that vengeance is 
limited to the offender. Our table therefore gives a minimum. The 
principle tends to be extended with the development of composition, for 
which, very naturally, the whole family is made liable. Thus we find 
vicarious vengeance mentioned in ‘27 of our cases among the Lower 
Hunters, and in ‘17 among the Higher, but in °38 of the highest Agricul- 
tural peoples. In this form, however, it is not so much vicarious vengeance 
as liability of the family estate for the tort of a member. 


84 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


more, my family must have some satisfaction out of his family ! 
Furthermore, the whole distinction between design and accident 
is by no means so clear to primitive man as it is to us, for though 
it needs little reflection and a very moderate amount of self- 
knowledge to distinguish between what one has done one’s self 
by accident or by design, and a very moderate degree of reasoning 
power to apply the distinction to other men—still, the nascent 
reflection of the savage is strangled at birth by the prevailing 
theory of witchcraft and possession.” Ifa tree falls upon a man’s 
head the savage holds that a spirit guided it. Ifa man, cutting 
a branch from a tree, dropped his axe on to another’s head, it 
may not have been the man’s own soul which guided the axe, but 
it was another soul which possessed him temporarily; he was 
possessed by some spirit, and as possessed he should be put out 
of the way. The treatment of the subject in the Hebrew codes 
illustrates the difficulty which is experienced even at a higher 
stage in strictly distinguishing between the two spheres of de- 
sign and accident. Each code assigns a city of refuge for the 
excusable homicide, but none make it perfectly clear whether 
it is unintentional or unpremeditated man-slaying that is in 
view. The Book of the Covenant simply says, ‘“ If a man lie 
not in wait, but God deliver him (the victim) into his hand, 


1 Of the union of vicarious revenge and the punishment of unintentional 
injury, the Hupa supply an instance which has at least the merit of com- 
pactness. A woman kindled a fire out of doors to boil water, a child fell 
into it and was burned, and the life of the woman’s son was sought in 
revenge (Goddard, Univ. of Calif. Publications, vol. i. p. 60). 

2 Messrs. Spencer and Gillen (ii. p. 556 ff.) describe an avenging 
party among the Central Australians setting out to kill a man living a 
hundred miles away, to whose magical practices they imputed the death 
of one of their friends. Finally, they failed to find the man and killed his 
father on the pretext that he knew of the practices and did not prevent 
them. As the whole charge of magic would probably be founded on nothing 
better than an antecedent enmity, together with some augury indicating 
the direction which the avengers should take, the pretext is a sufficiently 
thin screen for the real idea of vicarious vengeance. Still, it is interesting 
that it should be put forward. Among the Narrinyeri, Taplin (in Woods, 
Native Tribes of S. Australia, p. 34, etc.) speaks of a distinction between 
premeditated murder and manslaughter, and describes a combined “ tendi,”’ 
or meeting of two totemic groups, the one accusing a member of the other 
of murder, while the group of the accused declared that the death was 
accidental. But he adds: ‘“‘I cannot give the natives credit for much 
order. There was a tremendous amount of talk. Sometimes one would 
speak, then half a dozen would speak together—I could not make out the 
drift of the discussion.” This being so, we can hardly quote this evidence 
as proof of nice discrimination of degrees of responsibility among the 
Narrinyeri. 

3 Post, A. J., ii. 29. In West Equatoria the man who injures another 
in cutting down a tree is held the agent of an indwelling magical power 
and must submit to the ordeal of Mbundu drinking (7b.), 


f, 
fr 
iu 4 


LAW AND JUSTICE 85 


then I will appoint thee a place whither he shall flee. And if 
a man come presumptuously upon his neighbour to slay him 
with guile, thou shalt take him from mine altar that he may 
die.’ 1 In Deuteronomy there is an attempt to define accident. 
The city of refuge is appointed for “‘ whoso killeth his neighbour 
unawares and hated him not in times past.” The first qualifi- 
cation would be true of unintentional, the second of unpremedi- 
tated homicide. Then follows a somewhat elaborate illustration 
of a case of pure accident.2? “As when a man goeth into the 
forest with his neighbour to hew wood, and his hand fetcheth 
a stroke with the axe to cut down the tree, and the head slippeth 
from the helve, and lighteth upon his neighbour, that he die, 
he shall flee unto one of these cities and live:”’ and then it is 
once more stated that the slayer ought not to die, “inasmuch 
as he hated him not in time past,’ which would be true of any 
want of premeditation. Furthermore, even in this relatively 
enlightened code the unintentional slayer is not fully protected. 
It is clearly anticipated that the “ avenger of blood ”’ will pursue 
him “ while his heart is hot, and overtake him because the way 
is long,” and smite him mortally, and there is no hint that the 
avenger will be punished. Nor was the alternative, exile to the 
city of refuge, a merely nominal penalty. Finally, in the Priestly 
Code there is an elaborate attempt to distinguish different cases. 
The cities of refuge are appointed for every one that “ killeth 
any person unwittingly,” or, as the margin renders it, “ through 
error.” (An attempt is made to render the meaning clearer by 
specifying the implements used, of iron, wood or stone.) On the 
other hand, he who has killed another, “lying in wait” or “in 
enmity,” is to be put to death by the avenger of blood “‘ when 
he meeteth him.” In intermediate cases the congregation shall 
judge. “But if he thrust him suddenly without enmity, or 
hurled upon him anything without lying in wait, or with any 
stone, whereby a man may die, seeing him not, and cast it upon 
him, so that he died, and he was not his enemy, neither sought 
his harm: then the congregation shall judge between the smiter 
and the avenger of blood according to these judgments.” * Even 
here, then, the three cases of accident (“‘ seeing him not ’’), assault 
without intent to kill (“ thrust him suddenly ’’) and unpremedi- 
tated homicide (‘‘ without lying in wait’’) seem to be in a 
measure confused. And even in this code the avenger may 
slay the man-slayer anywhere outside the borders of the city of 
refuge until the death of the high priest. 


1 Exodus xxi. 13, 41. 2 Deut. xix. 4-6. 
3 Numbers xxxv. 15, 20, 21, 22—24. 


36 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


Not infrequently in early law we find the distinction that 
unintentional homicide is atonable by paying the wergild, while 
deliberate murder gives rise to the blood feud. Thus in the 
code of Hammurabi! the homicide might swear that the blow 
was unintentional and escape with a fine. So, again, though 
Germanic law begins by holding a man equally imputable 
for all that he has done, it is an ancient mitigation that for 
unintentional homicide the wer is due, and the blood feud should 
not be waged.? The disentanglement of innocent from culpable 
homicide was a very gradual achievement in medieval Europe 
though aided by the Civil and Canon Law, and the forfeiture of 
goods—the direct survival of the wergild—remained in theory in 
English law down to 1828.3 

It is a natural, though, to our minds, a bizarre consequence 
that in early justice animals and even inanimate objects may 
be regarded as appropriate subjects of punishment. ‘The slaying 
of offending animals is provided for in the Book of Exodus. 
Many cruel punishments were inflicted upon animals in the 
code of the Zendavesta,* and the same thing occurred in medi- 
ceeval Europe, where, perhaps under the influence of the Mosaic 
_legislation, it even survived in isolated cases to the sixteenth or 
“seventeenth century.’ The punishment of animals and inanimate 
objects was no mere wreaking of blind fury on innocent creatures. 
Probably, to the primitive mind, the ox that gored a man, the 
sword that slew, and the murderer that wielded it, were much 
more on one level than they can be to us. The animal or tool, if 
not conscious themselves, might be endued with a magic power 


1 Hammurabi, 206-208, cited above, p. 77. 

* Pollock and Maitland, ii. 470 and 471. In many cases, however, the 
innocent homicide can only escape by a recommendation to mercy. In the 
Anglo-Saxon law the distinction is not so much between intentional and 
unintentional as between open and secret slaying (2b., i. 52). This recalls 
the difficulties in Deut. and Numbers. Generally speaking, according to 
Post (A. J., ii. 28), the responsibility of the agent is not presumed as a 
ground of his punishment in Africa. But in some cases, as in Aquapin and 
Ashanti, the penalty for an accidental offence is reduced, and later (in 
contradistinction to earlier), Kaffir law imposes, as a rule, no penalty on 
accidental homicide. 

8 Blackstone, iv. 188. In practice ‘‘ as far back as our records reach,”’ 
the defendant could obtain a pardon and writ of restitution. The clear 
demarcation of individual responsibility is far from being universal in 
civilized law. In the Mohammedan world, a man’s family is collectively 
responsible even for damage done by him involuntarily (Post, Grundriss, 
ii. 216, cf. Dareste, p. 64). In China, involuntary offences are punished, 
though on a reduced scale. In the Japanese code of 1871 accidental injury 
to parents is heavily punished (Post, 1i. 218). 

4 Entirely, no doubt, under the influence of magical ideas. 

5 Yor other instances, see Post, ii. 231. 


pg AE 


~ 


LAW AND JUSTICE 87 


or possessed with an evil spirit. It was well to get rid of them 
before they did more harm. If not destroyed they might be 
purified. Thus in the English law of Doedand, which was not 
abolished till the middle of the last century, there is a survival 
of the view that anything that has killed a man must undergo 
a kind of religious purification; a cart, for instance, which ran 
over a man, or a tree which fell on him, was confiscated and sold 
for charity—at bottom merely a somewhat humanized version 
of the ancient Athenian process whereby the axe that had slain 
a man was brought to trial, and, if found guilty, solemnly thrown 
over the boundary. It need hardly be added that where re- 
sponsibility is extended to animals and inanimate objects, it is 
apt to be inadequately defined in the case of idiots, lunatics, and 
minors.* 

The principle of collective responsibility does not necessarily 
disappear with the rise of public justice under central authority. 
It lingers on, partly through sheer conservatism, but also in 
many cases for political reasons, to a late date. Thus it is 
particularly common to find that in political offences the family 
of the offender suffers with him. The principle of collective 
responsibility has always been maintained in the Far East, in 
China,” in the Korea, and, under the influence of Chinese civiliza- 
tion, in Japan, while it is noteworthy that for political offences 
the parents and children might be punished under French law 
right down to the time of the Revolution. Parallels could be 
found in the laws of the ancient East, of ancient Persia,? and of 


1 See Post, ii. 219, and, for the variation of custom under this head, 
Westermarck, Moral Ideas, pp. 265-277. 

2 Post, ii. 226. With this is associated punishment for unintentional 
offences (b., 217). In Chinese law, accidental parricide is still capital, 
though the older law appears to have been mitigated. A man who 
accidentally killed his mother in attempting to defend her, was sentenced 
to the lingering death, commuted by special decree to decapitation, subject 
to the Empress’s pleasure. See, for various instances, Alabaster, p. 159 ff. 
A wife killing her husband unintentionally is sentenced to decapitation 
(2b., 192). A misdeed which, however indirectly, caused the death of a 
senior relation is also punished, if the relative be a parent, by death (2b., 
320 seq.). A senior relative is punishable for a junior’s offence, even if he 
knows nothing of it; e.g. a father was sentenced to one hundred blows 
because (unknown to him) his son had abducted a girl (Alabaster, p. 152). 
A junior relative is still more heavily punishable for the offence of a senior. 
If a man murders four members of one family he suffers the lingering 
process, and his male children, irrespective of age, die with him in equal 
number to those murdered. In the case of Wang Chih-pin a child of ten 
was condemned to death for murders by his father. In another instance, 
the children were condemned to be castrated, the father having killed three 
persons (1b., 164). The motive is partly to punish the murderer’s spirit 
by cutting off his male descendants, on whose offerings he depends in the 


- new life (2b., 58). ; 3 Post, ii. 227. 


88 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


many states of medizval Europe. It is, in fact, only the decay 
of the joint family system and the rise of the free individual as 
the basis of the modern state which definitely does away with 
this principle, so fundamentally irreconcilable with the strictly 
ethical notion of justice. An interesting transitional phase is 
to be found in the Old Testament, where the visiting of the sins 
of the fathers upon the children is very definitely laid down as 
a piece of divine justice in the earlier legislation (1 mean in the 
second Commandment), whereas in the time of Ezekiel it was 
strongly maintained to be an injustice that when the fathers had 
eaten sour grapes the children’s teeth should be set on edge. It 
- was, in fact, part of the ethical revolution introduced by the later 
prophets to establish morally for the Jewish code the principle 
of individual responsibility.+ 


7. With the evolution of social order, and in particular with 
the growth of central authority, the redress of wrongs begins to 
take the form of an independent and impartial administration of 
justice. Let us trace this growth in outline from its beginnings. 
In order to do so we have to follow several strands of develop- 
ment, which are gradually woven together. 

(a) Sacral and other Public Offences.—In the first place, from 
a very low stage of social development we find the community 
as a whole, or its organs the council of elders or the chief, dealing 
regularly with certain actions which are resented as involving the 
community as a whole in misfortune and danger. These include, 
besides actual treason, conduct which brings upon the people the 
wrath of God, or of certain spirits, or which violates some mighty 
and mysterious taboo. The actions most frequently regarded in 
this light are certain breaches of the marriage laws and witch- 
craft.2. The breaches of the marriage law which come in question 

1 Ezek. xviii. 2; Jer. xxxi. 29. The result is embodied in Deut. xxiv. 
16: “‘ The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall 
the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to 
death for his own sin.’’ The same transition is found in the law of the 
Visigoths: ‘“‘ Let not father for son, nor son for father, nor brother for 
brother fear any accusation, but he alone shall be indicted as culpable who 
shall have committed the fault’? (Sutherland, Origin and Growth of the 
Moral Instinct, ii. 168). By Salic law a man might cut himself off from 
his family, but then, of course, he also lost its protection (2b., 167). In 
the Gilgamesh Epic we have an interesting appeal to the god to visit his 
offence on the sinner and not destroy mankind. 

* Cf. Steinmetz, Hihnologische Studien zur ersten Entwickelung der Strafe, 
il, 328-341. Among the Hurons in the seventeenth century murder and 
theft were punished by retaliation, but for a sorcerer death was authorized 
by the people, and the first comer might slay him (Le Jeune, writing 
in the Jeswit Relations, A.D. 1636, vol. x. p. 223). As to traitors, there is 
some conflict of evidence, Lalemand (vol. xxviii. p. 49) speaking of no 


’ 


,stress. A mere violation of the marriage tie is generally in 


| 


LAW AND JUSTICE 89 


here are confined to those transgressions of the prohibitions of 
intermarriage upon which primitive races lay such extraordinary 


savage society a private matter, avenged by the husband alone, 
or by those whose duty it is to help him; but a breach of the 
rules of exogamy, a marriage within the totem, for example, or a 
marriage outside the permissible class, is regarded as an offence 
endangering the community herself, and only to be wiped out 
by the extinction of the offender. A Central Australian tribe, 
for instance, which has no regular means of enforcing any law, 


will make up a war party to spear the man and woman who 


have married in defiance of these customs.t Similarly, common 
action will often be taken to protect the community from witch- 
craft, obviously a terrible offence in a society which firmly 
believes in it. Among the North American Indians a public 
sentence was often pronounced and carried out by the chiefs in 
cases of sorcery, and sometimes also in cases of cowardice or 
breaches of the marriage customs.2 The punishment of witch- 
craft is as widespread as the fear of it, and, prompted as it is by 
the sense of a danger to the whole community, is often peculiarly 
ferocious, and directed to the destruction of every one connected 
with the offender.® 





punishment but compensation, while elsewhere we hear of the traitor’s 
lability to be executed by the first comer. Magic murders and breaches 
of the tribal marriage rules are more than once mentioned by Messrs. 
Spencer and Gillen as illustrations of the offences which a council of the 
elders would punish. I+ is not distinctly stated, but one would infer that 
these are the regular occasions for such action, though they may at times 
deal with other matters. Among the Dieri, on the other hand, real as 
well as magic murder seems to have been punished by the council (Howitt, 
p- 321), though whether the council really represents the tribe as a whole, 
or a group or association of groups combining against an outsider, is not 
quite clear to me. From the fact that its vengeance may he vicarious 
(see above, p. 82) I should infer the second alternative. 

1 Sometimes the old men of the tribe will invite a neighbouring group to 

execute the criminal. Cutting and burning are sometimes substitutes for 
death (Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia, p. 495). 
_ *® Kohler, Zeitschrift fur vergleichende Rechtswissenschaft, 1897, pp. 412- 
416. For the punishment of sorcery, see Waitz, iii. 128. Among the 
Salish, Kwakiutl, Nootka, Tsimshian, Thlinkeet, and Haida peoples 
Niblack (R. B. H., 1888, p. 253) says: ‘In cases such as witchcraft or 
offences of medicine men, sentence of death or of fine is adjudged by the 
leading men of the village after trial. In most instances, however, the law 
of blood revenge, an eye for an eye, leaves little need for other than family 
councils, as they are purely totemic offences and are arranged by the 
injured gens.” 

3 “*The punishments affecting sorcerers can scarcely be called punish- 
ments. They are acts of annihilation.’’—Post, ii. p. 395, where numerous 
instances are given from all parts of the world. In some cases, the whole 


family of the offender perishes with him. 


90 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


In the same spirit any offences against religion or even breaches 
/ bf ceremonial rules may be made matter for public punishment. 
“Thus, among the Bellacoola Salish, the assembled chiefs would 
decree death for any transgression of the Kusuit ceremony, as 
by the unlicensed performance of a dance or making a mistake 
in dancing. So, too, among the Tsimshian the Council punishes 
sorcery and breaches of the prescribed dancing rules.2 Sometimes 
insanity or some eccentric habit may have serious consequences. 
‘Thus, among the Chepara, “‘ if a man became insane or was in the 
habit of idiotically muttering to himself, they killed him because 
they thought that it was Wulle (an evil being) that was influencing 
him, and that disaster might happen to the camp. In the same 
l tribe to show the Bull-roarer to a woman was a capital offence 
for both parties.% 

The object of the community in exterminating the offender 
“in these cases is not_so much to punish the wi man as to 
protect itself from a danger or from a curse. Achan 
takes the accursed thing; thing whic en devoted to 
Jahveh. The taboo on the thing devoted is at once communi- 
cated to Achan himself as though it were a poison or an infection, 
or, to take another metaphor, a charge of electricity. It passes 
from the spoil appropriated to the appropriator, and no resource 
remains but to devote Achan with all his family and belongings, 
everything, in fact, which the accursed thing had infected. The 
Roman criminal, if his offence bore a religious character, was 
“‘sacer ’’—separated from men, made over to the offended 
deities. His goods were set apart (consecratio bonorum), for they 
were involved in his impurity. He was banished, so that none 







1 Boas, Brit. Ass. Reports, 1891, p. 417. 

2 Boas, Brit. Ass. Reports, 1899, p. 832. By a curious turn of thought, 
both the vicarious principle and that of atonement may figure even in such 
cases as these. Thus, in the Bellacoola case, a relative may, if willing, be 
substituted for the offender (Boas, loc. cit.) Among the Tsimshian any 
crime may be atoned by sufficient payment (loc. cit.). Similarly among 
the Euahlayi, in Australia, taking a woman of the prohibited class was 
a deadly sin. ‘‘ But by a curious train of reasoning two wrongs make a 
right,”’ for such a man might stand the spear-throwing ordeal from the 
woman’s kin, provide a woman of his family for a man of hers (exactly the 
same breach of rules which he had himself committed), and then live with 
her in peace (Mrs. K. L. Parker, p. 79). 

3 Howitt, p. 354. 

4 Thus the undutiful son is “‘sacred”’ to the parental deities. ‘‘ Si 
parentem puer verberit, ast olle plorassit, puer divis parentum sacer esto ”’ 
(Bruns, Fontes Juris Romani Antiqui, p. 14). Treason to a client, or. 
ploughing up a neighbour’s landmark would also render a man “ sacer ”’ 
(cf. the curses in Deut. xxvii.). At bottom, the idea of some North American > 
Indians is similar, among whom the murderer is taboo, because haunted by 
the ghost of the victim (Kohler, Z. f. vgl. Rechtswst., 1897, 408). 


LAW AND JUSTICE 91 


might come into contact with his accursed person. He was cut 
off from fire and water, not primarily because fire and water were 
necessary to his life, so that he was sentenced to death by being 
deprived of them, but rather for fear that his accursed touch 
should pollute the sacred elements and convey the pollution to 
others. That the criminal suffered in consequence was a satis- 
factory collateral effect, but the main thing was to secure the fire 
and water from pollution. 

Thus far, then, public punishments, where they are any more 
than an explosion of indignant feeling, may be regarded as public 
action taken for the.sake of public.safety.. The community is 
threatened with palpable treason, or with occult magic influence, 
or by the wrath of the gods.2 It protects itself by destroying 
the traitor, or sacrificing, or, at any rate, getting rid of, the witch. 
It is a kind of public hygiene rather than a dispensation of justice © 
which is in question.’ 

In other cases the tribal offence is of a more secular character. 

ntercourse with an alien was held the deadliest offence among 
the Seri,t and was among the misdeeds that led to outlawry, 
and among the Makh-el-Chel of California the chief might put a 
woman to death either for marriage or adultery with a white 
man.» A chief himself was lynched among the Ni-shi-nan for 
kidnapping women to sell to the Spaniards. These are offences 
verging on treason.’ To them may be added, as essentially 
public matters, breaches of camp discipline and violations of the 
rules of the hunt. Thus, among the Kiowa Indians, ‘‘ Camp and 
ceremonial regulations were enforced and their violation punished 

1 Thering, Geist des Rémischen Rechts, 1. 275-277, etc. 

2 Among the German tribes the worst offenders were sacrificed to the 
gods, unless the latter showed signs of grace, in which case the offender 
became a slave of the gods, or was sold into slavery, or became an exile. 
The great offences were: breach of the peace of the temple, the army, or 
the meeting, of a special festival, or, finally, of the house; grave-robbing, 
treason, raising an army in rebellion, arson, black magic; anti-social 
crimes of peculiar depravity, such as breach of a sworn peace, unnatural 
desire, and acts of cowardice, such as desertion from the army; concealed 
‘murder and theft, in opposition to open murder and robbery (Schréder, 
Lehrbuch der Deutschen Rechtsgeschichte, pp. 74.and 76). 

8 Among the Central Sakai marriage within the family (including that 
of first cousins) is looked on with abhorrence. ‘“‘ Incest of this sort (for it 
does occur) is one of the few things that can stir an aboriginal community 
to its depths. It seems to invite the divine wrath, and no Sakai feels safe 
till the scoundrel is put an end to. And as the Sakai political system 
has no means of compulsion or punishment for dealing with cases of this 
sort, the tension becomes greater than ever’”’ (R. J. Wilkinson, Papers on 
Malay Subjects, ‘“‘ The Aboriginal Tribes,”’ p. 50). 

4 McGee, op. cit., p. 284. 5 Powers, p. 214. 6 Powers, p. 320. 


? Mere friendship with white men may be dangerous—a man was killed 
for this by the Dieri (Howitt, p. 332). 


92 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


by the ya’pahe (warriors) acting under direction of the war chiefs. 
Personal grievances were avenged by the injured party or by his 
‘nearest relatives without interference by the tribe.” } | 

(b) ‘‘ Occasional’’ Justice—In several of the above cases it 
is clear that it is not for lack of an organ of punishment that 
private matters are left to party vengeance. It is that they 
are not regarded as matters directly concerning the community 
as a whole, and the evolution of criminal justice may be 
looked at from one point of view as an extension of the 
conception of a “ tribal’”’ offence till it covers every serious 
wrong done to a single member of the tribe. We find a 
beginning in this direction when special offences that provoke 
indignation are met by a special act of collective resentment. 
This may be due to the unpopularity of the aggressor or to 
the status, influence, or popularity of his victim. Thus, of the 
Shoshones, Bancroft writes: “‘ Every man does as he likes, 
Private revenge, of course, occasionally overtakes the murderer, 
or, if the sympathies of the tribe be with the murdered man, he 
may possibly be publicly executed, but there are no fixed laws 
for such cases.” 2 This is typical of what we may call “ occa- 
sional ’’ public intervention in private matters. It is neither law 
nor justice, which go by rule, but an explosion of popular sym- 
pathy which may or may not be provoked by the personalities 
involved in the case. The objections to the offender may, indeed, 
be well founded. Thus, among the Central Eskimo, a man who 
had committed repeated murders might be killed with the 
consent of all his neighbours, and in Labrador we are told that 
a murderer who turned on the avenger of blood and killed him, 
might be put to death.? So among the Dakota we hear of the 
yillage council decreeing the death of some young men who had 
attempted the murder of their brother and threatened that of 
other people. The proceedings were held while they were asleep, 
and three men, one a half-brother, were delegated to dispatch 
them. 

(c) The Adjustment of Disputes.—It is easily intelligible 
that occasional intervention should harden and define itself 


1 Mooney, &. B. H., xvii. 233. Cf. Dorsey on the Hidatsa, R. B. £., 
xv. 243. 

2 Bancroft, p. 435. For the Lex Talionis among the Utah Shoshones, 
cf. Remy and Brenchley, Journey to Great Salt Lake City, ii. 292, where 
the actual instances given refer to the whites, but the practice is taken as 
general. : 

° Boas, R. B. H., 1884-1885, p. 582 and appendix. Turner, R. B. £., 
xi. 586. 

* Schoolcraft, vol. ii. p. 183. , 


LAW AND JUSTICE 93 


fet rules of custom. But there is another method of approach 
to regular justice which has, perhaps, had greater influence. 
It is the natural effort of friends, relatives and neighbours to 
prevent the development of a quarrel into a fight, particularly 
when the fight may involve ultimately all the consequences 
of a party feud. It is equally natural that the older men, or 
the chief, who is often no more than the most respected and 
influential elder of a little group, should be particularly active 
in this respect. Thus we often hear of a chief little that is definite 
except that he takes the lead in the movements of the band, 
having, perhaps, no authority but that which respect and his 
personal prowess or powers of persuasion may lend him, and that 
he settles disputes among his followers. Where his power is so . 
' purely personal, the submission to his judgment must be volun- | 
ary, and we must think of him not as a judge, but as a friendly 
protratr or rather, at first, asa conciliator. If the parties are 
ot satisfied, seli-redress remains. Thus, among the Montagnais, 
Micmacs (or Souriquois) and Etechemins, the Jesuits found small 
chiefs or “‘sagamores ”’ who, with the help of the friends, easily 
adjusted small quarrels. But these chiefs had no binding au- 
thority, and all serious crimes were occasions for vengeance or 
composition.1 Resort to the chief may be wholly optional. 
Among the Timorese the leorei is judge as well as king, but acts 
only in the rare cases when complaint is made to him. Every 
man or his family exacts justice on the wrongdoer, if possible 
by extorting compensation.” 

In many cases where a settlement of disputes by a council of 
elders, or a chief, is spoken of, we find on further examination 
that this method is merely subsidiary to that of self-help and 
private vengeance. ‘Thus, among the Nagas, Stewart certainly 
tells us that petty disputes and disagreements about property 
are settled by a council of elders, the litigants voluntarily sub- 
mitting to their arbitration. But he goes on to say that, cor- 
rectly speaking, there is not a shadow of constituted authority. 

_ It is true there is general peace. But this is founded on revenge, 
and the prosecution of it to the extremest lengths for the most 
trifling offences—and this not only as between different villages, 
but as between two members of the same village. In the rare 
event of a quarrel breaking out between two men of the same 


1 Biard, in the Jeswit Relations, vol. il. p. 73; vol. iii. p. 93, 

* H. O. Forbes, J. A. J., xiii. p. 421. As the Portuguese forbid the 
taking of life, we are told that now cases are brought before the Rajah 
in order to secure the fines. 

8 Journal As. Soc. of Bengal, p. 609. 


94 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


village, each has his party who “takes up his quarrel not by any 
means from a sense of justice, but from relationship—and a civil 
war ensues which is disgusting to contemplate.” In such cases 
as this it would be very misleading to speak of justice as adminis- 
tered by a court as we conceive it. The function of the council 
is clearly to maintain the peace if possible, but the real basis of 
order is the blood feud and the fear of it. 

‘The justice ”’ of a chief is often of the same subsidiary kind ; 

hus, among the Brazilians, von Martius? tells us that the chief 
hears the rare cases of dispute, associating with himself the 
sorcerer and medicine-man; that in grave cases whole families 
with their supporters come before him, that he tracks a thief 
and enforces restitution, and perhaps the punishment of wound- 
ing in addition (p. 81). But looking further, we find that in 
these tribes blood revenge is in full swing. There is no punish- 
ment for killing a man in a quarrel. Revenge is purely an affair 
of the family. It is only when death or injury is inflicted by a 
member of another tribe that the community takes the matter 
up. Vengeance is collective and spares neither children nor the 
aged. Where, then, is the chiefinallthis? He seldom meddled, 
we are told, in cases of homicide within the community, but there 
was no rule inthe matter. He might seek to appease the feud by 
getting the parties to accept composition, but probably this 
would only be accepted in the case of somewhat distant relatives 
(pp. 180, 131). Smaller quarrels were generally fought out, and 
it was thought discreditable |to bring them to the chief. In this 
case, then, the public authority as focussed in the chief is seen 
acting intermittently for the appeasement of strife by the well- 
known expedient of “‘composition.”’ But in the background, as 
before, lies the blood feud.? 

In particular, a chief or a council set themselves to secure the 

cceptance of composition. Thus, among the Khonds, we read 
that Retaliation is in general the sole remedy for wrongs of what- 
ever order, but society intervenes to prevent revenge by com- 
position, having in view “exclusively the private satisfaction of 
the individual, not the vindication of any civil or moral rules 

1 Beitrage zur Ethnographie Amerika’s, i. 59, ete. 

2? McPherson, Memorials of Service in India, p. 81. Among the Kayans 
we get a transition to public justice. The authority of the chiefs and the 
penalties imposed by them “are prescribed in a general way by custom,” 
but much depends on the personal qualities of each chief, and, “‘on the 
whole, the chief plays the part of arbitrator and mediator, awarding com- 
pensation to the injured party, rather than that of a judge’’ (Hose and 
McDougall, Pagan Tribes of Borneo, i. 65). Among the Sea Dyaks it 


would seem that the chief ought to execute justice, but “ties of relationship 
are impediments ” (Ling Roth, Natives of Sarawak, ii. 228). 


LAW SAND JUSTICE 95 


of right.’ Some very simple peoples have a complete system 
of arbitration, resort to which is altogether optional. Thus, an 
aggrieved Hupa might take his case to his headman or some 
other prominent person, who would suggest compensation. If 
the facts were disputed, witnesses would be heard and the 
“court ’’ would duly receive a fee. Personal injuries and homi- 
cide might be settled in this way, but it was equally open to the 
complainant to reject any settlement and demand life for life, 
vicariously or otherwise.1 
(d) Regulated Vengeance and Partial Control—A common 
modification of crude self-redress is the set. fight. This may 
be a mild affair, like the boxing matches by which the 
Western Eskimo sometimes settle their disputes.? Others are 
more deadly, as among the Yuracare, where, though a wound in 
the arm should end the fight, the duel, in fact, often proceeds to 
the death.? The duel generally takes place under prescribed 
conditions and may be terminated by a set test, as among the 
Kubu, where the abduction of a wife resulted in a duel in 
the water, the man who could submerge the other winning the 
woman.* It may be a test of endurance, as among the Kabi 
and Wakka, where the disputants grip one another and scarify 
the back with a flint till one or other has enough. The public 
or the chief may look on, and act as judges, as in West Victoria, 
where the protector of an ill-used wife must challenge the 
husband to a duel. Here is a germ of public intervention, and 
the matter becomes still more formal if the fight is between two 
kindreds or two local groups. Among the Southern Kamilaroi 
trespass disputes were settled in this fashion, and a single combat 
of champions might be substituted for a general encounter.? The 
expiatory encounters among the Australians, which have been 
mentioned above, were not properly fights, for the offender was 
only allowed to defend himself and not toreply. But his own rela- 
tives or his local group were at hand, armed, to defend him, and 
the precise conditions of the affair seem to have been a matter of 
negotiation. Thus, at Port Lincoln, Schiirmann § tells us of two 
‘murder cases, in one of which it was agreed that the murderer 
should stand two spear-throws from the brother of the victim, 
while the other was settled by a fight between eight men on each 
ide, which was stopped, though with much difficulty, without 
loodshed. The first is an expiatory meeting, the second a 


1 Goddard, Univ. of California Publications, vol. i. p. 59. 
* Bancroft, p. 65. 
% D’Orbigny, L’Homme Américain, i. 348. 4 Hagen, p. 136. 
5 Curr, iii. 121. 6 Dawson, p. 365. 
Howitt, p. 332. ap. Woods, pp. 245, 246, 





96 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


regulated fight. Both involve a certain amount of supervision, 
and we might say that, if the community definitely compel the 
offender to make atonement and would punish him if he refused, 
this would be a form of public intervention which we might 
describe as assistance to private revenge, while, if the avenger is 
similarly compelled to accept such satisfaction and demand no 
more, it is similarly public control of private revenge. How 
far public intervention would go, we are not always informed. 
Often we are told merely that this satisfaction is required by 
custom, just as in other parts of the world compensation is good 
custom. But among the Geawegal, Rusden? says “ obedience 
to such laws was never refused, but would have been enforced 
without doubt, if necessary, by the assembled tribe.”’ Curr, on 
the other hand, says of the Bangerang in a similar case, that if 
the offender had refused he would probably have been murdered 
by the injured party, and no one would avenge his death.* 
There would, of course, be the constraint of custom and opinion, 
but if this account is correct, no physical force other than that 
of the aggrieved party. A warrior who trusted sufficiently to his 
own prowess might snap his fingers at the custom,’ and, indeed, 
all the accounts show that if he knew how to use his shield, the 
exposure to the spear-throwing was, at worst, a very nominal risk.® 


1 A quite distinctive mitigation of the regulated fight in a peaceably- 
disposed people is seen in the nith songs of the Greenlanders. A man 
would challenge any one who had injured him to a contest of song at a 
meeting of the tribe. ‘“‘ The litigants stood face to face with each other 
in the midst of a circle of on-lookers, both men and women, and, beating 
a tambourine or drum, each in turn sang satirical songs about the other... . 
They related all the misdeeds of their opponent and tried in every possible 
way to make him ridiculous. The one who got the audience to laugh 
most at his gibes or inventions was the conqueror” (Nansen, Eskimo Life, 
p. 186, etc.). This is not the description of a trial, but of a regulated duel, 
only a duel of wits, a substitute for the serious blood vengeance which 
persists, though in a mild form. For murder, we are told, is regarded as 
a purely private affair for the murdered man’s nearest relatives to take 
up. There are, however, cases of extreme atrocity in which a village has 
been known to make common cause against a murderer and put him to 
death, and, as usual, we learn that to kill old witches and wizards is not 
considered criminal (2b., p. 162). The normal blood feud is varied by 
occasional outbursts of public resentment. 

2 Cp. Fison and Howitt, Kamilaroi and Kurnai, App. F. 

3 Squaiting in Victoria, p. 245. 

* See a dramatic story in G. 8. Lang, Aborigines of Australia, p. 8: 
‘a bold man, formidable with his weapons, could do anything with 
impunity.” 

5 The accused, says Beveridge, of the Riverina natives, generally acknow- 
ledged his guilt (which, if we may judge from other cases, would often be a 
quite imaginary charge of magic), stood the exposure, which was rarely 
fatal, and was then received again as an innocent man, having “ tholed 
his assize.”” Perhaps every fifth native, Beveridge thought, had killed his 
man (Aborigines of Victoria, p. 108). . 





LAW AND JUSTICE 97 


Further, both the regulated fight and the expiatory meeting - 
are in large measure affairs between members of distinct local 
groups, devised to avoid real and sanguinary battles between 
them, which would result if either side chose definitely to stand 
by its own member. Thus, among the Yuin, blood revenge was 
frequent and led to reprisals, hence the old men preferred the 
expiatory ordeal. So, among the Wotjobaluk, a murder might be 
adjusted by an expiatory meeting between the two totems con- 
cerned, but if the headmen were not careful to intervene when 
blood was drawn, the upshot might be a general fight between 
the two parties.1 In such a case, doubtless, constraint would, if 
necessary, be placed on the individual offender by his own group, 
and on the injured member by his group, but as between the groups 
the whole transaction would be a party affair. If the offender’s 

oup so chose, they might refuse the meeting and risk the fight.” 
Kat bottom, redress is a question of the strength of the parties. 

Thus, whether in the regulated fight or in the expiatory 
encounter, the basis is self-redress, and public intervention is 
present only in a germinal form. A further step is taken when 
the injured man can command the direct assistance of his 
' community, or his chief. Among the Gallinomero, according to 
Powers, the avenger had his option between the murderer’s 
money or his life, but if he chose his life, it was the chief who tied 
the criminal to a tree, while a number of people shot arrows into 
him. What means he used to enlist his chief on his side we do 
not know. Was there anything like an investigation, or did the 
affair go by favour and influence ?* We do not know, but we are 
clear (a) that thé initiation and direction of the affair is in private 
hands, (6) that public force is used in execution. This is definite 
public assistance of private redress. Among the Ojibways we 
are carried a step further, for the chief in council pronounced 
- upon a charge of murder, but (a) it was apparently at the option 
of the complainants to demand death or compensation, (6) it 
_ was the next of kin who executed the sentence, and (c) many 
cases never came into court, vengeance being taken directly by 
the relatives.5 \Again, instead of being assisted, vengeance may 

1 Howitt, pp. 334 and 342. 

As, e. g. among the Wirudjuri (Howitt, p. 332). 

- Powers, p- 177. 

* Among the Kurumba, a South Indian tribe or caste, the husband flogs 
| an erring wife and her lover—if he can. If not, he applies to the headman 
| to do itfor him. What arguments does he use? (Buchanan, in Thurston, 
| vol. iv. p. 164). Among the Karaya people the business of the chief is 
| to help in finding the offender. It is for the injured party to punish 

eee teich, Beitrage, p. 29). 
| *® P. Jones, History of the Ojibway Indians, pp. 108-109. 

H 


98 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


be controlled. Thus, among the Pitta Pitta in Queensland, after 
a fight, the old men of the camp would inquire into the cause. If 
the conquered man had ravished the victor’s wife or given him 
the ‘‘death bone ”’ (a magical process of securing his death) no 
further action was taken, but if the victor was in the wrong, he 
must undergo similar injury with similar weapon, even death if 
death he had dealt.1. In this case self-redress is controlled. 
Lastly, we have cases where chief or council direct the affair and 
inflict the punishment, but this consists in strict talion.2 Here 
we may legitimately infer that the public authority has taken 
over the business of redress, the old method being still applied 
for the full satisfaction of the avenger’s traditional demand. 
Lastly, the old view of crime may appear in the fact that the most 
serious offences are atonable, either by compensation which the 
court awards to the relatives, or by a fine which it takes to itself 
or puts to public use. Atonement, it should be observed, has a 
|;wider application than composition. It rests on the notion that 
an offence is something that can be made up for by some special 
acrifice, a good deed, a benefaction, or a penance, whereas 
composition is definite payment of damages for injury done 
to the party injured. In atonement the offender compounds 
with the community, with God, or with conscience.* Unfortu- 
nately, we are not always able ‘in our authorities to distinguish 
between Atonement and Composition proper, for while we 
are often told that a fine is the penalty, we do not always 
know to whom the fine goes. But it is sufficiently clear that 
both atonement in general and composition in particular still 
play a large part in the public punishment of the simpler 
societies.* 
(e) The T'ransition.—In an ordered society the murder of any 
simple citizen is regarded with the same feeling and provokes the 


1 W. E. Roth, p. 140. 

2 e.g. The Jakun, P. Favre, Indian Archip., vol. ii. p. 268. Cf. the 
Atkoor Chensu, among whom the death penalty was inflicted by the 
chiefs of clans in the same manner and with the same weapon as the murder 
(Captain Newbold, J. R. A. S., vol. viii. p. 275). 

’ Among the Padam Abors, crime was a public disgrace, to be expiated 
by a sacrifice, for which purpose the people took the first animal they 
found, leaving the owner to recover compensation as best he could from 
the offender (Dalton, p. 22). 

* Confining the title of composition to cases in which it seemed clear 
that the injured party is paid, and leaving all other cases of payment for 
murder, rape, etc., under the head Atonable, we enumerated 152 cases of 
composition and twenty-four of Atonement (expiatory encounters not 
reckoned). The majority of these would be associated with private 
redress. We have found at various stages thirty-four cases of composition 
or atonement associated with regular Public Justice. 


isi ess 


LAW AND JUSTICE 99 


same collective intervention which would be excited in a simple 
tribe, where self-redress is the rule, by incest or black magic. We 
called these tribal offences, and we may formulate the transition 
from self-redress to regular justice by saying that grave offences 
against the individual have become “tribal ’’ offences—injuries 
tothe community. Nor is this a wholly imaginary description of 
the actual method of transition, for in some cases we find evidence 
that simple homicide has a sacral aspect, and concerns the tribe 
on this account. Thus, among the Omaha, the murderer might 
be spared by the relatives, but he was still under a taboo and 
must pitch his tent apart for two to four years. Even the 
involuntary man-slayer must do similar penance, though for a 
shorter time, and the reason was that his presence infected the 
air.1 Frequently the homicide has to undergo a ceremonial © 
purification, even though his act was innocent or laudable by the 
standard of his society. He has the death-infection about him 
or is haunted, belike, by the ghost of the slain.2 Among the 
Dyaks not only incest—almost everywhere a “tribal ”’ offence— 
but bigamy might be a cause of bad weather and require a puri- 
fication of the earth with the blood of pigs and a taboo on the 
village for three days.* The shock to the customs and sentiment 
that regulates private intercourse clothes itself in the familiar 
supernatural garb. Condemnation of the act takes the form of a 
fear for the commonweal, which naturally reinforces the resolu- 
tion to put down such acts by the punishment and, if need be, 
extermination of the offenders. 

But, apart from sacral conceptions, the developing sense of 
justice, the natural sympathy with the injured man, and the 
dislike and fear of the aggressor, have an important ally in the 
necessities of the common safety. Self-redress is a dangerous 
proceeding, as the result of whiclf a little community may at any 
time find itself divided into two bitterly hostile factions. In the 
small Australian local groups, or in a Californian band, there will 
hardly be any one who is not connected with one or other of two 
disputants, and a quarrel will endanger the whole society. Hence 
even in the lowest societies we are not to suppose that serious 
aggressions are matter of entire indifference to the bystanders. 


+ Dorsey, ‘‘ Omaha Sociology,” R. B. H., 1881, p. 369. Fletcher and 
La Flesche, R. B. H., vol. xxvii. p. 215 

* Some cases, at least, of the Pe aRPAL: expiatory meetings are referable 
to this cause, e. g. among the Ngurla, people who have been absent when a 
relative dies, must not speak on return to camp till they have had spears 
thrown at them (Curr, vol. i. p. 289). So, too, among the Wiimbaio 
(Howitt, p. 452). 
. 8 Ling Roth, Natives of Sarawak, vol. i. p. 401. 


| 


Ls 


/ 


/ 


100 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


On the contrary, the public opinion of the group is always a 
force to be reckoned with. Every man’s rights and obligations 
are fixed by custom. The very vengeance taken on those who 
infringe them is a custom and directed in all its details by tradi- 
tion. ‘The headman or the elders of the clan or village are pre- 
pared to listen to complaints, to decide whether a wrong has been 
done, and, if so, what the reparation ought to be. The injured 
party may appeal to them if he pleases, and it may be that the 
aggressor will abide by their decision. If so, the affair is arranged 
perhaps by composition, perhaps by a stated penalty. Other- 
wise the parties will fight it out or it will come to a feud. Hence 
there is an effort on the part of the leading men to keep the 
peace and adjust the quarrel. Sometimes they will intervene 
of themselves if a feud becomes serious and threatens the 
general peace. 

The “‘ court,”’ if so it may be called, appears at this stage rather 
as peacemaker than judge. The disputants may ignore it, pre- 
ferring to trust to their own strength and that of their friends. 
Yet it is from the first the avenger’s interest to have public 
opinion with him. He relies on the countenance and practical 


| help of his kindred and fellow-tribesmen. At least he must 


avert their opposition. If the facts are peculiarly flagrant the 
neighbours will be with him and he will have the less difficulty 
in executing vengeance. Perhaps even the kindred of the wrong- 
doer will refuse to stand by him. Thus it becomes the interest 
of the avenger to make his case plain to the neighbours, and 
they in turn wish to hear what the accused party has to say. 
A palaver is held. The avenger comes with his kinsmen and 
friends. They state their case and announce their intention of 
seeking revenge. The accused is also present, backed by his 
kin, and repels the demands made on him. It may be that the 
matter is settled between the groups concerned. It may be 
that the neighbours or the chief give sentence, but even so it does 
not follow that they enforce it. They may give the appellant 
their moral support, and leave it to him to obtain satisfaction 
as best he can. But, of course, their decision helps him to get the 
opinion of the tribe on his side, and their moral force will be 
translatable into physical force. It will mean so many more 
backers for him, and so many less for hisopponents. This support 
may be disdained by the strong, but it will be valued by the weak, 
and will be upheld by those who desire internal peace. Feuds 
are averted by the adjustment of disputes, or, if a wrong has been 
done, by getting the complainant to accept composition and the 
aggressor to undergo some penalty which will be a mitigated form 


LAW AND JUSTICE 101 


of revenge, or by bringing the two parties to fight it out under 
the regular forms of a duel. 

_ Such methods of mitigating the blood feud are stimulated by 
the growth of the kingly power—that is to say, of an organized 
force outside the contending families or clans, which can sum- 
mon them before its bar, decide their cause, and require them 
to keep the peace. The king, whose duty and interest it is to 
maintain public order, treats crime—or certain kinds of crime— 

{no longer as an offence against the individual whom it primarily 

jaffects, but as a menace to public tranquillity, a breach of his 
peace.” 1 This, if he is strong enough, he will punish directly ; 
ff not sufficiently strong, he will deprive the offender of his 
protection, put him outside the king’s peace, and compel him by 
fine to buy back what he has lost. Thus we find crime punish- 
able by wite as well as by bét—a fine to the king side by side 
with compensation to the kinsfolk. 

But from moral assistance the transition*to physical assist- 
ance is not very difficult in idea, however slow and cumbrous it 
may have been in practice. ‘There is more than one method of 
transition. Sometimes we find the public authority, the elders 
or the whole body of the neighbours, or later the regular magis- 
trate, exerting themselves to arrest the offender and handing 
him over to the avenger of blood for execution, or judging 
between the avenger of blood and the man-slayer, whose act was 
“unwitting.” Thus in Deuteronomy, if the deliberate murderer 
flies to a city of refuge, “‘ then the elders of his city shall send and 
fetch him thence, and deliver him into the hand of the avenger 
of blood that he may die.”? But without taking an active 
part in the pursuit and capture of the offender the court had an 


1 Common in Germanic law. See, for England, Pollock and Maitland, 
ii. 451. The Kaffirs distinguish (1) offences against the king, which consist 
in infringements upon his property or the number of his subjects. In 
these they include treason, sorcery, murder, cruelty, rape, and abortion. 
(2) Offences against private people, which include adultery, immorality, 
theft, injury to a garden, etc. A similar distinction is found among the 
Kimbunda (Post, A. J., ii. 54). This is in effect a rudimentary distinction 
between civil and criminal] justice, and shows at least one avenue of 
transition to the conception of public crime. The notion of injury to 
an individual is applied to the king, but owing to the king’s special 
relation to the community, the notion, in being applied to him .is 
unavoidably extended and modified. In fact, potentially it covers all 
anti-social action. 

* Deut. xix. 12. So still in the priestly code, Numbers xxxv. 12-25. 
The law of the Germanic peoples, in the Frankish period, appears in a 
transitional stage. The Eastern Goths, Burgundians, Bavarians, and 
Anglo-Saxons left execution to the complainant. The law of the Western 
Goths excluded private execution; the Salic law gave the complainant the 
choice (Schréder, p. 371). 


102 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 
! 
aap weapon in the power of outlawry. Since in accordance 
with early ideas all personal rights depend upon membership of a 
‘society united for mutual protection, it follows that the man 
excluded from the group is in the position of a stranger and an 
enemy ; he is a wolf’s head, a wild animal whom the first comer 
.Inay put to death at sight, with whom nobody may associate, to 
‘whom nobody may give food or lodging. Outlawry can there- 
fore be applied either as a punishment or as a process—as a 
method of bringing the accused into court. What more reason- 
able than that if he will not submit to law he shall lose the pro- 
tection of the law? With this weapon, potent in proportion as 
the social order is developed, the court of early law consolidates 
its authority, and from a board of conciliation of uncertain powers 
and irregular constitution, becomes an established authority 
administering public justice, with compulsory powers before 
which either party can be summoned to appear at the instance of 
his opponent. 

(f) The Inner Group and the Wider Society— When we speak 
of public justice we have in mind, of course, a community 
with recognizable limits. But aggressions may be perpetrated 
by members of another community and there may then be no 
common court of appeal. In a circle of civilized communities 
all private offences would come under the jurisdiction of one 
community or the other. If an Englishman should be robbed 
in France, he would seek satisfaction in the French courts. 
It is only the class of grave public differences for which civiliza- 
tion has not yet succeeded in establishing a public justice 
which should include the community of the world. But in the 
simpler societies aggression by an outsider may give rise to 
retaliation on the part of the sufferer or his friends, and the result 
may be a feud between neighbouring villages or tribes. If the 
feud is organized by the village as a whole, and led by the chief, 
we should call it war, but when it is conducted by the injured 
party on their own account, it is true self-redress and may be 
called External Retaliation. Now we have seen that in the 
lowest cultural levels the community is very small, consisting 
for the most part of near relations, or at any rate of neighbours 
and friends. Such a community will protect its own members 


1 Sometimes it seems to be retaliation of this kind which our authorities 
have in view when they speak of the prevalence of blood revenge. Thus, 
among the Bagobos, blood revenge is said to be common, but it seems to 
be practised as between different villages, offences within the village being 
compoundable (Schadenberg, Z. E., xvii. 28). Among the Igorottes, 
vengeance was exercised upon members of other villages, but not, we 
conjecture, within it (see Blumentritt,-in Peterman, Ergbd, 1882, p. 287). 


LAW AND JUSTICE 103 


and will present a certain solidarity as against the rest of the 
world. Yet it may also be on social terms with other similar 
communities, visiting them, bartering with them, intermarrying 
with them, perhaps owning certain lands in common, having a 
common cult and ceremonies, recognizing a common tribal 
name, and even prepared on occasion to make common cause 
against outsiders. Something like this is the normal relation of 
the Australian local group to the tribe, and even, perhaps, to 
distinct but contiguous tribes... Now public justice may very 
well be developed within the smaller group, but not beyond it, 
and this appears, in fact, to have been the case in Australia. 
Thus, among the Yuin, if a man killed one of his own local group, 
he was put to death by order of the headmen, but a murder by one 
of another group gave rise either to vengeance or an expiatory 
meeting.2. And among the Boulia people, while vengeance within 
the group was controlled as we have seen, murder by one of an 
allied group was revenged by spear-throwing and not always 
by the exaction of one life alone. These are more like acts of 
retaliatory justice—mitigated and regulated, no doubt—within 
a loosely united society than of warfare between two distinct 
societies. ‘The relations are comparable to those of two or more 
clans which combine to form one tribe but still retain each the 
right of protecting and avenging its own members. We have 
seen above that relations within the clan may be quite different 
from those between clan and clan. Among the Wyandots, quite 
an elaborate juridical system was based on this distinction. 
An offence within the gens was tried and settled by the gentile 
council. An offence against a member of another gens was a 
matter for negotiation, and, that failing, retaliation on the gens 
at fault. Now the clans of a tribe which has acommon council 
or a chief, clearly form one society, and retaliation between them 
is a case of self-redress within a society. The Australian local 
groups do not so clearly form a society, and retaliation as between 
them is not so clearly a case of private justice but might instead 
be called private war. But this is not because the Australians 
are more advanced than the Wyandots in general provision for 
the maintenance of individuals in their rights, but because they 
are less so, because society, beyond a very small group, is more 
amorphous and less orderly. To get a fair comparative view of 


1 All the above conditions, for instance, would hold of the groups or, as 
he calls them, tribes, of the Boulia district, as described by Roth (op. cit., 


p. 41). 

* Howitt, pp. 342, 343. 3 Roth, 140. 

* Powell, R. B. H., i. p. 66. In the case of murder there seems to have 
been an appeal to the tribal council, but with what effect is not clear. 


104 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


the stages by which justice is established, then, we shall do best 
by ranging the justice within the Australian local group (though 
that is not necessarily confined to a kindred) with that of the 
Wyandot clan, and that of the Australian tribe with that of the 
Wyandot tribe. 

It is natural that something of the nature of impartial justice 
should be found in the small groups that constitute the primitive 
constituents of society before it extends to larger communities. 
In the hunting peoples of the Indo-Malay region, where the 
enlarged family is the society, we hear comparatively little of 
retaliation and self-help, and sometimes order seems to be en- 
forced and justice done by the elders of the group.1_ So far there 
is something of an analogy to public justice, but the analogy is 
only obtained by dropping out the essential differences between 
a society consisting of a couple of score of near relatives and a 
people like the Five Nations of the Iroquois, to say nothing of a 
civilized state. At the level where vengeance is organized, the 
unit is precisely a family group comparable to and often much 
greater than the entire community of the forest or jungle peoples, 
and. the evolution of public justice and order is essentially a 
problem of establishing equitable relations and peaceful co- 
operation between such bodies, and so constituting a political 
society. ‘To follow the evolution of justice intelligently, then, we 
must distinguish the cases where it is established within a con- 
stituent group from those in which it holds for a wider society. 
Public justice, in the full sense, should only be asserted when it 
prevails in a society which is larger than a family group, and 
when it holds, not only within but between the constituent groups 
of such a society. 


8. The Development of Public Justice—We have, then, 
numerous gradations of “public justice,’ from slight and 
partial beginnings to a complete system of control over the 
more important relations of men, and any of these gradations 
may be found either within an inner group or in an extended 
society. How far can we trace any actual social development 
along the line of these gradations? The materials at hand for 
an answer are (1) recorded history, (2) the indirect evidence of 
ethnology. To begin with the second, we can apply more than 
one test. First, we divide forms of justice into three grades. In 
the lowest we place cases where we have evidence of self-redress, 
with or without composition or the regulated fight. We add 
cases where we are told definitely that there is no regular method 

1 e.g. among the Negritos of Angat. 


LAW AND JUSTICE 105 


_ of redress, though evidence of this kind must be received with a 
~ certain amount of caution. We do not eliminate any case from 
' this class on account of “ occasional ”’ intervention as explained 


above, because that stands in strong contrast with regular justice ; 
nor on account of “tribal ” offences, because we are considering 
justice as between man and man, nor, lastly, on account of 
methods of the peaceful settlement of disputes which do not carry 
authority. In this grade, then, self-redress predominates. In 
the next grade we have (1) cases in which the avenger is either 
assisted or controlled by public force, or can get the judgment of 


_ a public court to sanction his act. We add (2) cases in which 


there is public punishment for some offences, e.g. murder, but 
not for others, e. g. rape and theft ; and (3) cases, not uncommon, 
in which there is a fully established system of public justice, but 
self-redress is still a recognized custom and unpunished. Our 
third grade consists of cases where a regular system of public 
justice deals normally with all serious disputes and grave offences. 
When we compare these three grades with our economic classi-. 
fication, we find (1) a continuous increase in public justice from 
the Lower Hunters to the Higher Pastoral and Agricultural; 
(2) in self-redress a corresponding descent from the Higher 
Hunters to the Highest Agriculture. But the Lower Hunters 
do not show so high a percentage as the Higher Hunters if we 
take into account the cases where there is a partial development 
of public justice within the Australian local group or the Indo- 
Malayan enlarged family. If, on the other hand, we take 
account only of justice in the wider society, we have a con- 
tinuous decline in this grade, corresponding to the continuous 
rise in public justice.t 

There is, however, a sense in which the Australians are more 
advanced than the Higher Hunters, and this is brought out by a 
slight modification of our grades. This modification is prompted 
by the difficulty of defining the beginnings of public assistance 
or control. We felt that in some way or other perhaps every 


- Australian group, and, indeed, every small and compact society, 


would, if all the facts were known, exhibit some beginnings of 
such supervision, and we therefore broke up our two first grades 
into three, the second being intended to exhibit public assistance 
in germ. We then had four classes altogether: (1) where there 
was self-redress, or “‘no law,’ and public punishments only 
“occasional ”’ or for tribal offences; (2) where there were regu- 


1 Simpler Peoples, p. 68 ff. The Higher Pastoral show a rather larger 
fraction than the Higher Agricultural. The Lower Pastoral, on the other 
hand, are below the Lowest Agricultural. 


106 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


lated or expiatory encounters, or arbitration, or some public 
punishments, assistance, or control combined with the independent 
existence of self-redress; (3) (a) where public assistance or 
control or public punishments in certain cases are recorded 
without any evidence of mere self-redress, and (b) where self- 
redress remains as an alternative to regular public justice; + 
(4) regular public justice, as before. The result of this classi- 
fication is to show that the Lower Hunters have a larger pro- 
portion in the second grade than in the first,? whereas with the 
Higher Hunters and even the lowest Agriculturist it is the other 
way. This is the only important irregularity. If we combine 
the two lower grades as cases in which self-redress predomin- 
ates, and the two higher as cases in which public justice 
predominates, we find a close correspondence with the economic 
grading. The following gives the figures? in each economic 
class, and also reduces them to a fraction of the total number 
of recorded instances. 


Self-redress Public justice Public justice 
predominating. predominating. regular. 
Lower Hunter . . 50% (:98) 1 (:02) Oye > 
Higher Hunter*. . 59 ('84) 114 (16) ( 05) 
Lower Agriculture . 24 (‘72) 94 (°28) 6 ( '18) 
Lower Pastoral . . 9% (:70) _»& (.30) RS Boa 
Agriculture . . . 57 (+57) 43 (43) 214 ( °21) 
Higher Pastoral SO Sa) 94 (61) 74 ( °48) 
Higher Agriculture . 26 (29) 644 (°71) 374 ( *41) 


Further, when the classification is applied to each continent 
severally, the correlation holds in the main, though in certain 


~ 

1 4.¢. if self-redress is combined with a partial or incipient public 
justice it drags the case down to the second grade. If it is combined 
(as an alternative) with a regular system of public justice, itdoes not. 

2 In apportioning the Australians to one or other of the first two grades 
we are in agreement with the final judgment of Howitt, who paid special 
attention to this branch of Australian sociology. ‘‘ It will be evident that 
a distinction is drawn between offences which merely affect the individual 
and are therefore left for him to redress, and those which may be called 
tribal offences, such as murder by evil magic, breaches of the exogamous 
law, or revealing the secrets of the initiation ceremonies. Such offences 
were dealt with by the elders and their leader, the headman of the tribe ”’ 
(p. 354). 

Py For the wider society, not for the inner or primary group. The 
fractions arise from the counting of “probable” cases and partial 
instances (portions of a group) as one-half. 

4 Including a group of Dependent Hunters, 7. e. Indian and other jungle 
tribes living in close association with more civilized people, and probably 
much affected by them. Omitting them, the fractions for the Higher 
Hunters would be 92, :08, °05. 


LAW AND JUSTICE 107 


cases the numbers are too small to be of value for purposes of 
computation.? 

It must be added that when we find a partial public justice 
in the lowest economic grades, the circumstances make it suffi- 
ciently clear that the motive is to prevent self-redress. In 
the case of the Queensland tribes, where the evidence for public 
justice is the most definite that we have, this is not only clear 
from the nature of the offences dealt with,? but is specifically 
indicated by Mr. Roth, who says that the determined efforts 
to stop quarrels are due to their tendency to spread through the 
whole camp, all the tribal brothers on each side taking them up. 
The regulated fights and the negotiations and discussions in such 
tribes as the Narrinyeri and the West Victoria group, all point 
the same way. They are means of avoiding serious battles 
and persistent vendettas. Possibly the structure of Australian 
society, with its marriage classes cutting across the local groups 
and building up complex relations between group and group, 
possibly also the nomadic habits breeding casual intercourse with 
outsiders, together with the strong development of the belief 
in witchcraft as the cause of natural death, may have given 
to these attempts to mitigate vendettas the special prominence 
which they occupy in Australian social life.? Be that as it may, 
we can say with some definiteness that among the considerable 
number of peoples known of the lowest hunting levels, there is 
no case of regular public justice beyond the limits of the enlarged 
family, and that whatever public intervention in private rela- 
tions is found, is clearly an attempt to mitigate retaliation. 
The “intensive”? development of justice is matched by the 
extension, which is also roughly correlated with general cultural 
advance, of the society which forms the unit within which it 
holds good. At the lowest stage we have self-redress in some 


1 The only class that causes any doubt is that of the ‘‘ Dependent 
Hunters’ in Asia. These occupy in some cases an ambiguous position 
between tribes and castes, while in any case they have been greatly in- 
fluenced, especially as respects governmental arrangements, by the 
more civilized societies to which they belong. If, however, we include 
the more independent among them with the other Higher Hunters, we 
get in the result a ratio which is just the same as that for the Lowest 
Agriculture. 

2 e.g. homicide, as such, is no crime. If a man kills his wife he must 
give up a sister to his wife’s friends for death. Homicide is punishable 
with death when it would lead to revenge (Roth, p. 141). 

8 Further, the expiatory meeting is a form of atonement, which is 
replaced among the Higher Hunters, and still more by more advanced 
societies, by composition. But composition is not so provocative of formal 
interference by outsiders, and does not, therefore, for our purpose, remove 
a case from the lowest class. 


108 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


instances even within the enlarged family; then it appears 
mainly as between kinsfolk or local groups in a tribe or a sub- 
stantial village. Then there is peace within the village, and 
feuds of villages, till these are welded into a petty state. Retalia- 
tion now becomes distinctly differentiated from war, but war 
itself is, at bottom, the self-redress of a community within the 
entire circle of nations, and the final elimination of the principle 
it embodies is yet to come. 

There is further direct historical evidence among most civilized 
peoples of a development from the private to the public system. 
Ancient Egypt is the principal exception. Here we have no 
evidence from the slight indications in the records of private 
justice! or even of a transitional stage. Regular courts with 
witnesses existed from the old Kingdom,” and we observe that 
even political criminals were brought to trial.* Torture was 
used, and under certain circumstances we read of something 
like an oath of purgation.4 The death penalty was not infre- 
quent, though in the 18th Dynasty reserved for Pharaoh.’ 
Mutilation, especially the cutting off of the nose or ears, was in 
use, and the rod is the regular mark of justice. The too insistent 
complainant might himself get beaten.? Punishment, at least 
in political cases, might be collective, involving a man’s whole 
family. The kingly power was arbitrary and might be tyran- 


1 Apart from the right to kill a faithless wife and her lover (Gardiner, 
Ene. Religion, art. ‘* Ethics and Morality—Egyptian,”’ p. 480). 

? Erman, Aus dem. Pap., p. 82. (Witnesses required in a will suit.) 

3 e.g. in the Harem conspiracy (20th Dynasty), where the judges are 
even warned against over-zeal (Breasted, Ancient Records, iv. esp. p. 213). 
Even in the summary treatment of treason the accused are to be con- 
fronted with witnesses and then drowned secretly (Erman, Fall Abgekur. 
Justiz., p. 9 et seq.). 

4 In the story of Peteesi (Griffith, iii. 105), two priests are made to swear 
that they are not guilty and to pay damages. Perhaps they are paying 
for their fellows who had done the mischief (cf. Breasted, Records, iv. 
259). The oath here is a kind of conditional curse, and is apparently 
taken as sufficient purgation after a severe examination. For the torture 
of a woman, cf. p. 271. The instrument was the bastinado. 

5 Gardiner, 480. 

6 A private citizen of the 5th Dynasty is pleased with himself because 
‘““ Never was I beaten in the presence of any official since my birth ”’ 
(Breasted, i. 125). 

7 See incidents in the story of the Eloquent Peasant (Gardiner, Die 
Klage des Bauern, p. 12), which is a stinging satire on official indifference. 

8 “* Slay him (an unruly vassal), wipe out his name, [destroy ?] his kins- 
folk; suppress his memory [and ?] his dependants who [?] love him.” 
Instructions of King Mery-ke-re (Middle Kingdom, Gardiner, Journal Eg. 
Arch., Jan. 1914, p. 24). Cf. the extradition treaty of Rameses II., where 
the punishment of wife and children is barred by agreement (Breasted, 
iii. 173), and the curse calling on Isis to pursue the wife and Horus the 
children of the offender (7b., p. 86). 


LAW AND JUSTICE 109 


nical, but we hear of enactments against official extortion 
corruption.” On the other hand, the true norm of punishment 
is ideally fixed by the gods, priests formed the tribunals, 
and in the New Kingdom petty cases were decided at the local 
shrines. On the whole, justice in its earlier phase, regulated 
in principle, more or less arbitrary in effect, using in the 
main rational procedure but employing torture, the rod, and 
severity in punishment, tending to laxity and corruptness in 
administration, is fairly exemplified in ancient Egypt. 

In all other civilized codes we find historical evidences of an 
originally private system and a gradual transition to rational 
public justice. In the code of Hammurabi, courts exist and 
witnesses are mentioned, but that punishments were always 
public, except in the case of the erring wife, does not seem so 
clear as Kohler and Peiser think (Hammurabi’s Gesetz, § 126). 
Certainly the provisions for punishment are saturated with the 
ideas of the blood feud (cf. above, pp. 85-88). In India the law 
books present us with developed codes of public justice, but self- 
help is allowed in certain cases, and in others it is open to every 
man to execute the offender (Oldenburg, in Mommsen, p. 72). 
Thus, in Manu, a list is given of eighteen cases with which the 
courts deal (viii. 4-7), but self-help is countenanced, and homi- 
cide is justifiable, “‘in a strife for the fees of officiating priests, 
and in order to protect women and Brahmanas.” “ By killing 
an assassin the slayer incurs no guilt, whether he does it publicly 
orsecretly.’’* Further, crimes in general were atonable, including 
murder, except that of a Brahman. The fine went originally to 
the family, and so was true composition, depending on the caste 
of slayer and slain. In the law books, however, it falls to the 
king. Chinese tradition places the first public execution in the 
reign of Huang-ti, 2601 B.c., before which time chiefs had fought 
with one another and taken no prisoners (Alabaster, 52). The 
ten ‘abominations ”’ include offences against the State, religion 
and the family, but no ordinary “ private’’ offence. Apart 
from these ten all offences were commutable, though, at least in 
modern law, at the discretion only of the sovereign (Oppenheimer, 
p-111). The fact, however, is rightly taken by Dr. Oppenheimer 


1 See the curious recommendations in the Instructions of Mery-ke-re, 
loc. cit., p. 26. 

2 Breasted, iii. 26, 31, etc. Contrast, however, Griffith, Papyri, iii. 98: 
“ There is no profit in going into the house of judgment. Thine adversary 
is richer than thou.” 

3 Cf. Gardiner, Enc. Rel., loc. cit., p. 480. 

4 Manu, viii. 348-51; cf. Vasishtha, iii. 15-18, 24, who among six kinds 

of assassins reckons an incendiary and the abductor of another’s wife. 


110 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


as evidence of their original character as private wrongs. In 
the present law vengeance and composition are in general for- 
bidden (Alabaster, pp. 5, 6), but a son is justified in killing his 
father’s murderer on the spot (7b., 165), and if he kills him after- 
wards will only be bambooed. Similarly, the husband may kill 
his wife’s lover on the spot, and the wife herself with a relatively 
light penalty (2b., 251). Primitive Arabic justice is founded on 
revenge, and both the Israelite and Mohammedan codes are 
developed on these lines. In Mohammedan law retaliation still 
plays a considerable part. In Mohammed’s time the blood feud 
was in full vigour. Mohammed imposed the death penalty by 
law for wilful murder and enforced composition for involuntary 
homicide, the wer being one-half for a woman and one-fifteenth 
for a pagan, all the kin being responsible for it (Dareste, p. 64). 
Wounds are also punishable by retaliation or composition 
(1b., and Hughes, Dictionary of Islam, p. 481). The retaliation 
is executed by the next of kin (Hughes, 481), but, if legitimate, 
only with the judgment of a court. Private revenge without 
sanction is, however, not entirely excluded (Post, i. 260). 

The distinction of private and public offences lies at the 
foundation of Roman law. Perduellio, a direct act of hostility 
to the state, is the oldest public crime (Hitzig, in Mommsen, p. 
37). Parricide as a crime is older than the XII Tables and by 
tradition as old as Numa. But the original meaning of the word 
is not certain (2b., 38; Oppenheimer, pp. 121, 122). Ifit included 
the killing of any free Roman this is a case of public punishment 
of a private offence from a veryearlyepoch. On the other hand, 
the “law of Numa,” “‘si quis hominem liberum dolo sciens morti 
duit parricidas esto,’’ seems to preserve the tradition of some 
narrower scope for the original meaning of paracidium, and of 
some definite institution by which murder of a free man was 
identified with it and for the first time publicly punished. That 
private vengeance held for homicide Hitzig, (/.c.) takes as probable 
but unproven. Bodily injuries, however, are still punishable in 
the code of the XII Tables by talion, or compensation, and the 
law made no distinction between intentional injury and neglect 
(Hitzig, p. 42). Later developments of the law enforced the 
acceptance of composition, and distinguished intentional from 
unintentional injury. The killing of the fur mantfestus is recog- 
nized in the XII Tables, while the fur nec manifestus pays double 
the value. Only theft of crops is a public offence (7b., p. 39). 
The unchaste daughter or wife were judged originally by the 
domestic tribunal, and the adulterer might be killed if taken in 
flagrantt. The punishment of rape as a public offence is not 


LAW AND JUSTICE 111 


primitive (1b., p.41). Altogether the history of private offences 
shows the gradual suppression of self-help. The first step is to 
regularize and restrict it, the next to protect agreements for 
composition, the next to enforce it on both parties (3b., p. 36). 
In general, the development of Roman criminal law moves 
clearly from the stage when only “ public ’’ offences are publicly 
punished, through the regularization of private vengeance, 
to the principle that a serious offence against a free man, 
and finally even the “unfree,” is an offence against the state. 
The only obscure point is the early history of murder. 
Early Greek custom was under the protection of the oath or 

curse (cf. Iliad, [X. 453-6, the curse on Phoenix— 


A | ae , > \ 
Geot 8 éeréXevov €TAPAs 
ZLevs Te KaTaXGov.os KL €7ralv?) Ilepoedoveta) 


and of the gods, in particular of Zeus who sent storms if men “‘ by 
violence gave crooked judgments in the market place” (Iliad, 
XVI. 387). Such judgments were given by councils of the elders 
on the free submission of the parties or by the king (Wilamowitz 
Mollendorf, ap. Mommsen, p. 21), but we hear of no criminal jus- 
tice (Freudenthal, 2b., p. 9). The homicide, voluntary or in- 
voluntary, flies the country. The relatives exercise vengeance 
(Freudenthal, 7b.) but may accept composition, and the slayer— 


> , 4 > “A , >] > , 
ev onpw peeves avTOV TOAN’ azroticas. 


Historic Greece has everywhere a fully developed system of 
public justice with rational procedure, with no criminal process 
for unintentional offences (Freudenthal, 7b.,11). But the Dra- 
conian murder-trial is simply a state-regulated vengeance (Wila- 
mowitz, p.28). In Attic law the “ public ’’ character of “‘ private ”’ 
offences is, perhaps, first fully recognized by the law of Solon 
enabling any citizen to prosecute (Freudenthal, p. 10, Wilamowitz, 
p. 25). But residual traces of self-redress remain in the limitation 
of the right to prosecute for homicide to the nearest relatives, 
and. the right of forgiveness (aideois) by the relatives or the 
dying man. Apparently the involuntary homicide could be kept 
in exile at the will of the relatives to a late period (Aristotle on the 
Constitution of Athens, chap. lvii. and editor’s note). Homicide 
on the highway was not punishable in Attica before the end of 
the fifth century (Wilamowitz, Staat und Gesellschaft, p. 38). 
The dyov tyntds, in which each party named a penalty and 
the court decided between them, may also be.a relic of the older 
view of punishment as a satisfaction, the amount of which it is 
the duty of the court to fix. 


{12 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


For Germany, the list of offenders publicly executed in Tacitus 
(chap. xv) consists of proditores, transfugae ignavi, imbelles, and 
corpore infames. 'This, whatever the exact meaning of the last 
term, accords well with an ordinary list of “tribal ”’ offences. 
Tradition, language, and comparison of the codes shows that 
certain offences were held in contempt (Nithingswerk in North 
Germany) and punished with outlawry involving death unless 
divine pardon was obtained (Schréder, 77). These include 
breaches of the special peace of the temple, the meeting, or the 
house, acts dangerous to the public, black magic, ete. Of private 
offences the list includes only unnatural offences, murder and 
theft. In these last two cases the point was their secrecy. 
Murder in particular is a concealed and denied manslaying, and 
the cowardice which renders it a Nithingswerk is the attempt 
to escape the feud. Secrecy is also the contemptible element 
in theft, open robbery is not Nithingswerk. Thus, in principle, 
offences against individuals are not publicly punished, but only 
a certain cowardly and contemptible way of performing them. 
As such the private wrong gave rise to a feud or to composition. 
This might be effected purely between the parties or in court. 
In the latter case the court took a portion of the fine (Schréder, 
p. 80). Roethe (Mommsen, p. 63) thinks the legists inclined to 
overstate the interference of the community, and holds that 
pure self-redress is the original institution. He points out also 
that the Sagas illustrate vengeance for unintentional homicide. 
The gradual and partial distinction is indicated by Brunner 
(ib., p. 55). Partly based on military conceptions of honour, the 
Teutonic code has more than once had to make concessions to 
the military class tending to the readmission of self-redress (cf. 
Brunner, p. 56; Oppenheimer, p. 129), and even to the present 
day the same influence may be traced. 

Nothing marks the re-barbarization of Europe in the Karly 
, Middle Ages so strongly as the fact that the system of public jus- 
\ tice built up in the Greco-Roman civilization gave way to the bar- 
,baric system. On the other hand, the services of the Medieval 
(Church in deprecating vengeance and upholding social peace 
hugh not to be forgotten. So great a change as the suppression 
of vengeance by justice is not accomplished but by slow degrees, 
and in Europe the old system left its legacy to the modern world 
in the form of the duel. The peculiar notions of honour en- 
gendered by militarism maintained in the classes whose trade was 
fighting the belief that the stain of a disgraceful deed could be 
wiped out by superior skill in sword-play, while it was the 
bounden duty of a man who had suffered a mortal injury to give 


LAW AND JUSTICE i ae Ge 


his traducer or assailant the opportunity of also killing him. 

_ Such beliefs, so deeply rooted in the habits of a military caste, 

_ long survived the prohibitions of the Church and the edicts of 
kings (see Decret. Grat. C. J., 464, referring to the judicial duel). 
In the Decret. Greg., 805, a clerk is to be deposed for duelling, and. 
tournaments are forbidden (p. 804). The latter, however, were 
legalized by John XXII. (p. 1215). The Council of Trent 
threatened not only duellists, but kings or feudal lords who 
allowed duelling in their territories with excommunication 
(C. J., pp. 98, 99). In England the duel succumbed to the cool 
common sense of middle-class juries. On the Continent, though 

undergoing a continual process of attrition, it is maintained in a 
dishonoured old age among such other perquisites of the military 
class as the right to run unarmed citizens through the body for 
an alleged insulting word. 

To the evidence of the historic civilizations must be added 
certain instances in the uncivilized world where tradition pre- 
serves the memory of an extinct system of self-redress.* Lastly, 
the case of justice and the general maintenance of order is 
perhaps the only department of ethics in which we may adduce a 

_ theoretical argument in confirmation of the historical evidence. 
For the community with the better order has palpably a better 
chance of survival than the more anarchical, and, culture for 
culture, it is very unlikely that the Hunters or Agriculturists 
of earlier epochs would be better governed or more peaceably 
ordered than those of our own time. The probabilities are all 
the other way, and if any tribes have survived in spite of very 
slight acquaintance with the arts, it is more likely to be those 
who knew how to cultivate internal peace and good fellowship 
than their opposites. We may infer that if we could see the 
ascending scale of society set out in time as we see it through 
anthropology at what is (relatively to the duration of human 
society) a single moment, the correlation of the methods of 


1 It might be said that a society where duelling obtains ought to be 
classed in the third of our four grades (above, p. 106), and that modern 
continental countries would therefore fall below many barbaric peoples. 
But this would be to overlook the exceptional character of the duel as 
(1) the privilege of the upper class, (2) contrary to the letter of the law, 
(3) only justified in special cases in accordance with the code of honour, 
(4) neither applicable to the punishment of crimes nor the maintenance of 
civil rights. If, in fact, we found any barbaric society with vengeance 
80 circumscribed, we should include it in our highest class, as, in fact, we 
have always done where only vengeance on the adulterer or the faithless 
wife is allowed. 

2 e.g. the Araucanians (Latcham, J. A. J., xxxix. 355), the Sonthals 
(Man, Sonthalia, p. 91), and the Kols (ib.). These are important as appear- 
ing among the Indian peoples where self-redress has generally disappeared. 


I 


SS 


114 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


justice with the general advance of civilization would be not less 
close but closer than that which we have seen. 

Our argument does not go to prove the development of im- 
partial justice from vengeance. On the contrary, in some very 
simple societies the evidence for vengeance is slight. They are 
peaceable people, who seldom quarrel among themselves, and 
that is probably why they have been able to maintain themselves 
with so slender a material equipment through the ages. It goes 
to show rather that the root of public intervention is the sense 
of the common safety. Hence the early punishments of sacral 
offences. Hence the solidarity of clan or group against others. 
Hence the mitigation of vengeance and the assumption of 
communal protection in its place. Hence the limitation of 
impartial justice to whatever group really feels itself to be one. 
Hence, finally, the protection of all members of society when all 
are really felt to be morally members of one body. Sympathy 
is an impulse leading to this consummation, but occasional 
sympathetic action is precisely not justice because it is based on | 


‘ a personal feeling. Nor is the sense of solidarity justice, because 


it ignores the individual. It is the fusion of the two, of the 
feeling for another and the enlarging conception of the welfare 
of the whole, which constitutes the basic material of true justice, 
wherein, as in all ethics, a rational impulse defines and 
harmonizes the prompting of innumerable elements of feeling 
and emotion. 


9. Procedure.—The mere establishment of impartial justice 
is by no means the same thing as the formation of a Court 
of Law in the modern sense. The primaryfunetion.of a 
primitive tribunal is not so much to discover the merits of the 
case and make an equitable award, as to keep the peace and 
prevent the extension of wild and irregular blood feuds. What 
the court has to deal with is the fact that a feud exists. A 
comes before it with a complaint against B of having killed 
his kinsman, or stolen his cattle, or carried off his daughter. 
Here is a feud which, in the absence of a court, A will 
prosecute with his own right-arm and that of his kinsmen if 
he can get them to help him. B, again, will resist with the 
help of Ais kinsmen, and so there will be a vendetta. The 
court, whose primary object is to secure a settlement, does 
not go into nice questions as to the precise merits and de- 
merits of A and B, but it can prescribe certain tests whereby 
the appellant or the defendant may establish his case. It sets 
the litigant “‘a task that he must attempt. If he performs 


- LAW AND JUSTICE 115 


it, he has won his cause.” The performance of this task is 
not, to our minds, proof of the justice of his cause. It is rather 
the compliance with a legal and orderly method of establishing 
a case, but at the stage we are considering it was probably 
regarded as satisfying justice, at least as far as justice claimed 
to be satisfied. 

What task, then, would the court award? It might be that 
the litigant should maintain his cause with his body. The 
parties would then have to fight it out in person or by their 
champions. Here we have the regulated fight in the form of 
a judicial duel carrying a sentence as its result. Again, the 
court might put one or both parties to the oath. But this is 
not the oath of the modern law court—that is to say, it is not a 
solemn asseveration of the truth of certain evidence of fact, but 
an assertion of the general justice of the claim alleged, or of its 
injustice, as the case may be. And as the feud will not be waged 
by the individual claimant alone, but with the aid of all his 
kindred, so the court will expect the kindred to come and take 
the oath along with him. Hence the institution of oath-helpers, 
the compurgators, who are in point of fact the fellow-clansmen, 
all bound to the duty at this stage of swearing their friend out 
of the difficulty, just as before they were bound to help him out 
of it by arms. The compurgators are simply the clansmen 
fighting with spiritual weapons instead of carnal ones. Success 
in the cause will depend not on the opinion formed by the court 
as to the veracity of one side or the perjury of the other, but on 
the ability of the parties to get the full number of compurgators 
required, on formal correctness in taking the oath, and if both 
parties fulfil all conditions and no further means are available 
for deciding between them, on certain rules as to the burden of 
proof .? 

The provision of such further means of deciding between the 
parties is logically the next step. So far, the judicial process 
has appeared merely as a substitute for the blood feud, but 
both the oath and the judicial combat point the way to a higher 


1 Pollock and Maitland, ii. 602. 

2 Which oath prevailed in case of a conflict would be decided according 
to the custom ruling the case. One party would be “ nearer to the oath ”’ 
than the other. For instance, where the criminal is caught in the act, the 
oath of the prosecutor with his oath-helpers is conclusive proof, and the 
offender has no opportunity of self-defence (Schréder, p. 363; cf. Pollock 
and Maitland, ii. 579). In the Frankish period the complainant might also, 
if the circumstances allowed, demand the ordeal; in other cases, with a 
few exceptions, the burden of proof was on the opposite side (Schréder, 
op. cit., pp. 363-366). Where the oath is not decisive, the parties go to the 
duel or to the ordeal. 


116 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


ideal. Thecourt itself is not in a position to try the merits of the 
case unless it be some very simple matter of the criminal caught 
red-handed, but it may refer the decision to the Unseen Powers, 
to the gods, or to the magical qualities inherent in certain things. 
Thus the judicial duel, instead of being a mere carnal fight 
regularized and limited by certain rules, may be conceived rather 
as an appeal to the judgment of God, and the victory as His 
sentence which the court hesitates to pronounce on the basis 
of its merely human wisdom. Similarly the oath—though less 
than evidence as we conceive evidence—is also more, for it is 
an appeal to powers in which primitive man implicitly believes, 
to take vengeance on him who swears, if his cause be not just. 
Hence the form of the oath is everything, for the Unknown 
Powers are great. sticklers for form. The oath-taker calls down 
their punishment on himself and his family by a set formula 
which they will rigidly obey. If in the formula he can leave 
himself any loophole of escape, the oath is void: it is no true 
summoning of the vengeful powers, and the court will disregard 
it, but if it is complete and sound in point of form, then there 
is no escape. One of two things must happen: either the oath 
was true or the curse will fall, and thus perjury brings its own 
punishment. 

Hence it is that for any given charge the law may call upon 
a man to purge himself by oath, or perhaps to purge himself 
along with a specified number of oath-helpers who will suffer 
with him if the oath is false, and the oath-helpers required may 
be increased according to the seriousness of the crime. If 
the oath fails the prescribed punishment follows. If it is duly 
taken, then either the accused was innocent, or he had inflicted 
the punishment entailed by the broken oath on himself and his 
oath-helpers. 

But the consequences of a false oath were not immediately 
apparent. If the court wished to have the judgment of the 
Unseen Powers before it some more summary process was neces- 
sary. This was found in the Ordeal, a test to which both parties 
could be submitted if necessary, and of which the results were 
immediate and manifest. Probably no institution is more 
| frequent at a certain stage of civilization than that of testing 
\the truth or falsity of a case by a certain magico-religious 


1 Thus the subsequent misfortune is taken as proof of perjury, and 
sometimes with a certain inconsistency the secular arm is then called in to 
increase the penalty. Thus, among the Kondhs of Orissa, and also among 
the Congo people, if the curse falls, the oath-taker is banished along with 
his family (Post, ii. 493). 


LAW AND JUSTICE 117 


_ process—the eating of a piece of bread, the handling of burning 
iron or boiling oil, jumping into water, walking through fire, 
- exposure to wild beasts, and so forth. The details vary, though 
even in detail resemblances crop up at the most remote periods 
and in the most remote places, but the general principle is still 
more clearly constant through the ages and the climes.t Truth 
cannot at this stage be tested by human evidence. At most the 
criminal caught red-handed may be summarily dispatched upon 
the evidence of eye-witnesses given there and then, but the 
complicated civil or criminal processes of the civilized world 
imply an intellectual as well as a moral development which 
makes them impossible at an early stage. It is the gods who 
judge; the man who can handle hot iron is proved by heaven to 
be innocent ; the woman whom the holy river rejects is a witch; 
he whom the bread chokes is a perjurer. Nor are these tests 
wholly devoid of rational basis; it is not so difficult to under- 
stand that the guilty man would be more liable to choke than 
the innocent, not because bread is holy, but because his nerves 
are shaken. It is quite intelligible that in a credulous age the 
false oath would bring its curse in the form of a will paralyzed 
by terror, just as we know that amongst many savages witch- 
craft really kills through the sufferer’s intense fear ofit. Lastly, 
if the criminal may be ready to take his chances of the curse 
in preference to the certainties of the scaffold, he may find 
it difficult to get compurgators to stand by him, and in the 
face of their plain knowledge involve themselves in the same 
risk, 


1 Among the Australians we have the ordeal in the form of the expiatory 
encounter. This seems to be trial and punishment in one, or, perhaps, as 
we have seen, it is rather atonement than either. Magical processes were, 
indeed, employed to discover the direction in which the man whose witch- 
craft caused a death might be found. But this, again, belongs to detection 
rather than trial. If we, then, omit the Australian cases we do not find 
the ordeal among the Lower Hunters, and it is very rare till we reach the 
second stage of Agriculture. Thereafter it becomes very common (Simpler 
Peoples, p. 80). 

Two or three Australian authorities speak of some sort of trial, e.g. 
Beveridge of the Riverina people; Mrs. Parker of the Euahlayi (but with 
reference, I think, only to the spear-throwing); Dawson of West Victoria, 
and Taplin of the Narrinyeri. In these and other cases we are certainly 
to suppose excited arguments between accusing and accused local groups, 
but we have no clear evidence of anything more. It is only in the North 
and North-West Central Queensland districts that Roth speaks clearly of 
a sort of inquiry by the old men into the merits of the case. With these 
exceptions we found no indications of a trial among the Lower Hunters, 
only two among the Higher, and three in the lower divisions of Pastoral 
and Agricultural peoples. In the Higher Pastoral and Agricultural stages 
they become common (loc. cit.). 


118 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


10. Thus by degrees there develops the conception that it is 
the duty of the court to try the case, to obtain proof of facts, to 
give its own verdict based on its own judgment, and execute its 
own sentence by its own officers, and which may take the initia- 
tive through its own officers. The steps by which this change is 
achieved belong in detail rather to the history of jurisprudence 
than to that of comparative ethics. Only certain broad features 
of the new phase concern us. Its primary condition is the fuller 
development and clearer expression of sentiments that are 
present from the first, but it is naturally stimulated and furthered 
by the formation of an effective organ of government. The 
elders or the petty chief of the village community hesitate to 
carry out a death sentence or inflict corporal punishment for fear 
of involving themselves in the blood feud.1| Where there is an 
executive power with sufficient force behind it to raise its officer 
above the fear of revenge, public justice can have full play. 
Hence the decay of blood revenge and the rise of public justice 
are frequently associated with the growth of kingly power. 
For example, in Europe in the early Middle Ages we have seen 
that certain offences were treated as breaches of the king’s peace. 
This peace was a protection afforded in the first instance to 
certain places and times, but it was gradually extended, largely 
it would seem, through the king’s protection of the roads— 
“the king’s highway ’’—to all places and all times. Thus the 
act which had been a breach of the king’s peace, punished by the 
withdrawal of his protection only when committed at certain 
times and places, now became an offence against him at all times 
and places. Its punishment was still outlawry. But as out- 
lawry deprived a man of all rights, it enabled the king to inflict 
what penalty he chose. The criminal, in fact, was at his mercy : 
any penalty short of death with forfeiture of all goods would 
be an indulgence, and hence the Royal Courts could fix a scale 
of punishments at their pleasure.? 

With the growth of public justice the function of the courts 
_ is changed : they have no longer to supervise the feuds of hostile 
families, but to maintain public order, to detect and punish 

crime, and to uphold innocent people in their rights. This 


1 So Prof. Robertson Smith remarks on the appearance of corporal 
punishment in Deuteronomy, that it is evidence of the comparatively 
settled state of the country and the growth of the social order since the 
time of the Book of the Covenant. No Arab Sheikh would inflict corporal 
punishment on a tribesman for fear of revenge (Deut. xxv. 3: Robertson 
Smith, Old Testament in the Jewish Church, p. 368). 

* Jenks, Law and Politics, pp. 109-117; Pollock and Maitland, ii. 
453-463, ete. | 


LAW AND JUSTICE 119 


involves numerous changes. In the first place, self-help, the 
_ obtaining of satisfaction by the strong hand, is no longer neces- 
~sary. The injured man can get a remedy from the court, and 
vengeance is forbidden. The victory is not immediate, and often 
the state has to come to some compromise with the old system. 
For example, vengeance may be allowed in jflagrante delicto, or 
within a certain period after the offence. Where state justice 
is very weak, an asylum may be granted within which revenge 
must not be executed ; in other cases where the process is further 
advanced and justice is getting the upper hand, revenge is allowed 
only with the consent of acourt.1 Or, lastly, excluded from all 
weakness in cases where strong passions are excited—for example, 
in breaches of the marriage law to this day in many civilized 
countries.2. The transition was the harder because it involved a 
fundamental ethical change. From its beginning, as we have 
seen, social order rested on the readiness of every man to stand 
by his kinsmen in their quarrels. Hence the duty of avenging 
the injured kinsman, and therefore of loving one’s neighbour 
in this sense and hating one’s enemy, was the most sacred of 
primitive principles, bound up with everything that made a 
common life possible. Public justice bade men lay aside this 
principle, and its triumph constitutes one of the greatest of 
social revolutions. 

But if the kindred bé’no longer allowed to avenge themselves, 
the corresponding right of the offender to make peace with the 
kin is also withdrawn.? A crime is now a public affair, and in 
varying degrees according to time and country the public au- 
thority takes upon itself the function of maintaining order and 
of discovering as well as punishing offenders.*| The trial ceases 

1 This, in strictness, is Mohammedan law (Kohler, quoted in Post, i. 
260). 

2 For instances see Post, i. 260, 261. Post quotes the Japanese Law 
Book of 1873, which treats premeditated blood revenge as murder, but 
excuses the son who strikes down the murderer of his father on the spot. 

3 See Pollock and Maitland, ii. 485. 

“ The rise of impartial public justice in Europe connects itself with 
“Trial by Inquest.”’ Early in the Middle Ages the bishops made diocesan 
tours and held inquests into public morals, and in the ninth century they 
employed a ‘“‘jurie d’accusation,’’ which indicated delinquents. These 
were at first allowed to purge themselves by oath, but this right was with- 
drawn under Innocent III., and the court was allowed to proceed per 
inquisitionem, holding an inquiry, and requiring not purgation but defence. 
The accuser at this stage is a public authority, not merely a private enemy 
prosecuting afeud. A corresponding development occurs in England when 
the Grand Jury, as representing the common knowledge of a neighbour- 


hood, presents a list of criminals for trial. The accusation could not any 
longer be submitted to trial by battle, as the accused could not fight the 


120 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


to be a milder form of the blood feud. The complainant no 
longer exposes himself to equal punishment by way of retaliation 
‘ in case he loses his suit. What was previously accusation now 
\ becomes denunciation... Again, though the injured party may 
set the whole process in motion, the result will differ vitally 
according to the nature of the act of which he complains. Jus- 
tice, having public interests in view, will count not only the 
magnitude of the injury suffered, but the degree of culpability 
in the man- who inflicted it. Vengeance, the object of the 
older process, breaks up into the two distinct ideas of punish- 
ment inflicted by the judge, and restitution assigned to the 
complainant. Civil and criminal justice are , distinct 2 


11. But once become serious in its determination to investigate 
the case before giving sentence, public justice could not long be 
satisfied with the older supernatural machinery. In medizval 
Europe it was early a matter of remark that the battle was not 
always to the just. ‘‘ We are,” says the Lombard king, Luit- 
prand, “uncertain about the judgment of God, and have heard 
that many through the battle lose their cause without justice, 
but the Law itself, on account of the custom of our race of 
Lombards, we cannot forbid.’ The question was matter of 
controversy during the ninth century, Agobard, Archbishop of 
Lyons (d. 840), arguing against trial by combat and the ordeal, 
while Hincmar, Archbishop of Rheims (circ. 806-882), supported 
them. 

It was therefore a great step in advance when ordeals, which 
had been adopted by the Church after the barbarian invasions, 
were condemned. by the Lateran Council of 1215. As a conse- 


whole Grand Jury (Stephen, i. 254), and as ordeals were falling into dis- 
credit the only resource was the Inquest. This was a method, already 
in use in Norman law, of establishing facts by the sworn judgment of a 
number of men (petty jury) representing “‘ the verdict of the country.” 
Thus our system, though it has retained much of the accusatory character, 
has been deeply influenced by the Inquisition, or, as we call it, 
‘* Inquest.”’ 

1 Hsmein, p. 84. The “ accusatory ’? method fell into disuse in France 
in the fourteenth century. But the penalty of retaliation was retained, 
though softened in application (7b., 108). Denunciation was readily 
conceded in the case of commoners, while nobles still retained the right 
of combat (7b., 85). 

* The distinction is not affected by the fact that both results may be 
sought by a single process; e.g. in French law a criminal may be con- 
demned to pay damages to the injured party by the same sentence which 
consigns him to prison. 

3 Taylor, The Medieval Mind, i. 231, 232. Charlemagne ordered all 
men to believe the judgment of God without any doubt (Schréder, 367). 


LAW AND JUSTICE 12] 


“quence they disappear in England after the reign of John,! while 
the oath of compurgators is gradually converted into evidence to 
-character. The ordeal by battle 2 remained, but an alternative 
was offered in the form of a judicial inquiry with witnesses and 
evidence. The accused might, in English phrase, “‘ put himself 
upon his country,” 2. e. let his case go before a jury, men of his 
neighbourhood knowing the facts and prepared to testify to 
them, or, in French phrase, the accused could be offered the 
“enqueste du pais.’’ And this alternative, if at first optional, 
soon manifested its vast superiority, and the settlement of all 
disputes and all accusations by an impartial tribunal, which has 
heard what both sides have to say, becomes an integral part of 
the civilized order.* But even-handed justice is not reached at 
one stride. The public authority, having once taken up the 
function of repressing crime, are more bent on efficiency in the 
maintenance of order than on nice considerations of justice to 
individuals. Their tendency is to treat the accused man as 
guilty, and means of proving his innocence are somewhat grudg- 
ingly meted out to him as privileges rather than as rights, while 
deficiencies of evidence are boldly supplemented by the use of 
torture. In English law, indeed, torture (except in the case 
of the peine forte et dure) never seems to have been fully recog- 
nized: if used by the absolute monarchy it was as a political 
instrument rather than as part of the ordinary machinery of law. 
On the Continent, on the other hand, owing partly, perhaps, to 
a stricter theory of the amount of evidence necessary for proof, 
partly to the fact that the authorities were more determined to 

1 Pollock and Maitland, ii. 599. In France, compurgation and unilateral 
ordeals almost completely disappeared in the thirteenth century. The 
oath with oath-helpers was still not uncommon in England, but the view 
“that you cannot wage your law about facts are manifest’ was beginning 
to prevail (Pollock and Maitland, ii. 634). 

2 It was forbidden in France by St. Louis in 1260, ‘‘ Nous defendons a 
tous batailles par nostre domengne et au lieu de batailles, nous mettons 
preuves de tésmoins,” but this ordinance could not be imposed in a day 
upon the Signorial courts. Before the accession of Edward I., judicial 
combats were limited to felony, but one of the parties might prefer a jury. 
Champions for hire still existed (Pollock and Maitland, 11. 632, 633). 

8 For a long while the alternative was treated as optional in English 
law. The oath and the ordeal had been the old legal methods of proof, and 
“no one,” say the Leges Henrici, with the air of resisting a monstrous and 
novel injustice, “is to be convicted of a capital crime by testimony ”’ 
(Pollock and Maitland, ii. 650). But, urged by manifest necessity, the 
lawyers found indirect methods of compulsion; a man cannot be hanged 
for murder merely because he is proved by witnesses to have committed 
it, unless he first agrees to stand or fall by what they say, and forego his 
right to the ordeal. But though he cannot be compelled, he can be rigidly 


imprisoned until he gives his consent, and, finally, he can be pressed to 
death by the “ peine forte et dure.” 


122 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


suppress crime than to protect individuals from the possibility 
of undeserved suffering, torture became a recognized method of 
supplementing defective evidence. The judicial conscience was 
easier if it extorted a confession from a man before condemning 
him, than if it acted solely on evidence undistorted by physical 
suffering! Even where torture was not allowed the accused was 
not always put on a level with the prosecution as to the right of 
giving evidence, calling witnesses and employing counsel. It is 
not until all these conditions are fulfilled that a Court of Justice 
can be said to come up to the ideal of a place in which the full 
merits of the case are investigated before a verdict is given. 
Even now it must be remarked than an English trial preserves 
much of the form of the old judicial combat. Its method of 
obtaining a verdict is still that of pitting attack and defence 
against one another. It may be that this is the best method of 
obtaining truth where human interests and passions are at stake, 
and that the advocate must always retain a place beside the 
judge: but what seems clear is that the power of the purse in 
retaining the best legal skill is a make-weight, especially in civil 
cases, of no slight practical importance; and it is possible that 
our descendants will look back upon a system which allowed 
wealth to count for so much before what should be an absolutely 
impartial tribunal, as not differing so much as we should like to 
think from the old ordeal by battle. The fight with the purse 
is not the ideal substitute for the fight with the person. 


12. We have seen that public justice often led to severity in 
the process of obtaining truth; still more was this the case in 
the punishment of crime. Accompanying the growth of order 
in a barbarian society there is, as has been remarked above, a 


1 Torture was originally applied only to slaves in Roman law, but was 
extended to freemen in cases of treason and afterwards in other cases as 
well. It was originally unknown to the barbarians, but under Roman 
influence it was introduced into the Salic, Burgundian and other Jaws in 
application to slaves (Esmein, p. 93; Schréder, p. 369). Fostered by the 
need for evidence in the procedure by inquest, and by the determination 
to repress crimes, it gradually became, especially in Germany and Italy 
(Esmein, p. 284), a flagrant abuse. All the guarantees which the accused 
had were taken from him by degrees. The procedure became secret, he 
was not allowed to employ counsel or to cite witnesses. In this direction 
the inquisitorial process was pushed further in France than elsewhere; 
England was apparently saved from it by the gradual change which 
converted the jury from witnesses into judges of the case. It is noteworthy 
that the severity of the French procedure was accepted by the public and 
was even popular (op. cit., p. 158). The public feeling of the period 
went with the authorities in concerning itself more for the suppression of 
crime than for supporting the rights of accused individuals. 





oH 


LAW AND JUSTICE 123 


- tendency to substitute a system of composition for blood venge- 
ance by a money payment. This system made for social peace, 


but, particularly with the increase of wealth and difference of 
rank, it lent itself to frightful abuses. Crimes, punished perhaps 


. too fiercely in early society, became for the well-to-do too lightly 
_ and easily atonable, and it is not surprising that at the next 


stage of social development, in which the central power has 
consolidated itself and the executive has become strong enough 
to dismiss any fear of the blood feud, a period of severer 


_ punishment should set in. Crime now becomes a revolt against 
authority, a challenge to the powers that be, civil and perhaps 


ecclesiastical as well, to put forth all their strength to subdue 
it. Moreover, the central authority at its best acts in the 
interests of public order, and on the whole represents the principle 
of impartial judgment as between disputants, and of progress 
towards internal peace and the reign of law. On the other hand, 


order is stili difficult to maintain and powerful families are 


recalcitrant. From such causes as these acting in combination 
the criminal law now reaches the acme of its rigour. Death 
penalties or savage mutilations are inflicted for offences of the 
second and third order, torture is freely used to extort con- 
fession, and the brutality of the mob is called in to supplement 
that of the executioner. 

As to the severity, or rather barbarity, of the criminal law in 


Europe down to the nineteenth century little need be said, as 


the broad facts are well known. In England death was theoreti- 
cally the penalty for all felonies except petty larceny and may- 
hem, from the Middle Ages down to 1826. This rule was subject 
to the exceptions based on “‘ benefit of clergy,’’? which originally 
meant the right of a clerk to be tried in the ecclesiastical courts ; 
then, being extended to all who could read, became something of 
the nature of a class privilege, and finally, in 1705, the necessity 
for reading! being abolished, was converted into a means of 
grace. The punishment for a “clergyable’”’ offence was to be 


- branded in the hand and imprisoned for not more than one year, 


except in the case of larceny, which by the law of 1717 was 
punishable by transportation for seven years. From the fifteenth 
century onwards a succession of statutes excluded more and more 
offences from benefit of clergy, and thus at the end of the seven- 
teenth century such offences as arson, burglary, horse-stealing, 
stealing from the person above the value of a shilling, rape and 
abduction with intent to marry, were all capital ‘‘ whether the 


1 Peers, and clerks in holy naeaes however, retained special privileges. 
" Stephen, i. 463, etc. 


124 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


offender could read or not.” 1 In the eighteenth century the 
list was lengthened, but transportation was often substituted 
for the death penalty. Women were still burnt alive for the 
murder of a husband or master, or for coining.2 Both men and ' 
women were whipped, the men publicly through the streets, the 
women as a rule privately, for petty thefts.? The pillory was 
still in use for perjury and other offences.4 Meanwhile the state 
of the prisons, where innocent and guilty, debtors (often with 
their families) and convicted criminals were all huddled together 
without discrimination, was, when Howard began his work, a 
scandal of the first magnitude. Gaol-fever raged, prisons were 
still private property, and the prisoner, innocent or guilty, had 
to fee his gaoler and pay for every comfort and even for neces- 
saries. In the Bishop of Ely’s prison the gaoler prevented 
escapes by chaining his prisoners on their backs on the floor, 
and fastening a spiked iron collar about their necks. “ Even 
when re-constructed it had no free ward, no infirmary and no 
straw ; and debtors and felons were confined together.” ® 


13. But even before Howard’s time a new order of ideas was 
slowly emerging. As society becomes more confident in its 
power to maintain order, the cruelty and callousness that are 
born of fear are seen in a new light. More humane influences 
make themselves felt, and from that moment excessive severity 
begins to militate against the proper execution of the law, 
especially under a jury system like ours, With the advance 
of civil and religious liberty, political or ecclesiastical offences — 
grow rare, and a breach of the law becomes more and more 
synonymous with a grave moral offence against society. The 
whole problem of criminal justice is thus transferred to the 
ethical plane, but the change raises problems which a century 
has been too short a time to solve. The general right to punish 
may be derived from the right of society to protect itself. This 
principle taken by itself ® might be held to justify the barbarities 


1 Op. cit., 467. 

* In practice they were generally strangled first, but this depended on 
the executioner. Even the torture of the flames did not prevent an 
eighteenth-century mob from pelting and jeering at the victim. See the 
cert: of the burning of Barbara Spencer for coining in 1721 (Pike, ii. 
287, 288). 

3 2b., 380. ‘ Till 1816. For perjury till 1837 (<b., 377). 

5 10,, 866. / 

§ So taken it is a one-sided account. ‘ Punishment, like other actions, can 
only be justified as doing the maximum of good and the minimum of evil 
admitted by the circumstances to all concerned./ If any evil (suffering or 
loss of character) is inflicted on the criminal which is not absolutely 


LAW AND JUSTICE 125 


of the old law, had not experience shown that extreme severity 
was not in reality an effective instrument of discipline, while 
it undoubtedly tended to harden manners and accustom people 
to witness suffering with indifference. Its dealings with the 
criminal mark, one may say, the zero point in the scale of treat- 
ment which society conceives to be the due of its various members. 
If we raise this point we raise the standard all along the scale. 
The pauper may justly expect something better than the criminal, 
the self-supporting poor man or woman than the pauper. Thus, 
if it is the aim of good civilization to raise the general standard 
of life, this is a tendency which a savage criminal law will hinder 
and a humane one assist. Moreover, the old rigour, so far as it 
rested on reason at all, was based on a very crude psychology. 
People are not deterred from murder by the sight of the murderer 
dangling from a gibbet. On the contrary, what there is in them 
of lust for blood is tickled and excited, their sensuality or ferocity 
is aroused, and the counteracting impulses, the aversion to 
bloodshed, the compunction for suffering, are arrested. Fear, 
on which the principle of severity wholly relies, is a master 
motive only with the weak, and only while it is very present. 
As soon as there is a chance of escaping detection it evaporates, 
and, it would seem, the more completely in proportion as the 
very magnitude of the penalty makes it difficult for a man really 
to imagine himself as the central figure in so terrible a drama. 
Finally, the infliction of heavy penalties for secondary crimes 
may induce a reckless despair, and the saying about the sheep 
and the lamb was but too apt a comment on the working of 
the criminal law at the time. Thus the first step of reform was 
to abolish the ferocious penalties of the old law. In this direc- 
tion a long list of well-known and honoured names—Beccaria, 
Howard, Bentham, Romilly, Fowell Buxton, Elizabeth Fry— 
indicate roughly the intellectual and moral influences at work. 
The Society of Friends, French Rationalists, English Utili- 
tarians and the Evangelicals played their part in this, as in so 
many of the changes that have made the modern world. The 
movement was under weigh by the second third of the eighteenth 
century. Beccaria’s book was published in 1764 and had an 
immediate success, bearing early fruit in the abolition of torture 





necessitated by social security, or the ultimate welfare of the criminal 
himself, it is evil inflicted for its own sake, which is the essence of 
immorality. 

1 Already, in founding Pennsylvania, Penn had allowed capital punish- 
ment for murder alone. The Philadelphia society for relieving distressed 
prisoners was formed in 1776 (Wines, 142). 


126 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


on the Continent. Branding was abolished in England in 1779. 
Capital punishment had been abolished for a time in Russia in 
1753, and the purchase of prisoners as galley-slaves was forbidden 
by Maria Theresa in 1762. In England the peine forte et dure 
was abolished in 1772, and in 1770 a House of Commons Com- 
mittee even reported that there were some offences for which 
the death penalty might with advantage be exchanged for some 
other punishment. ‘These few indications show that the tide 
was beginning to turn. In France the movement was hastened 
by the Revolution. The Declaration of Rights in 1789 laid 
down the controlling principle of the modern theory that “the 
right to punish is limited by the law of necessity,” and this 
was supplemented in 1791 by the declaration of the Assembly 
that “‘ penalties should be proportioned to the crimes for which 
they are inflicted, and that they are intended not merely to 
punish, but to reform the culprit.’”’1 Im accordance with this 
principle the Assembly made imprisonment the chief method 
of punishment, and founded the penitentiary system of France. 
In England the great re-action produced by the Revolution 
retarded the reform of the criminal law, but throughout the 
time of the Revolutionary Wars men like Romilly fought an 
uphill fight. He succeeded in suppressing the death penalty 
for pocket-picking in 1808, but his subsequent efforts to abolish 
capital punishment for stealing goods of the value of five shillings 
from shops were frustrated by the House of Lords.? Little 
progress, in fact, was made till 1832, when horse and sheep 
stealing ceased to be capital, and from this time onwards the 
list of capital offences was steadily reduced, till in 1861 murder 
was, for all practical purposes, the only one that remained.® 

Meanwhile, as substitutes for the old savagery, there grew 
up first the transportation and then the penitentiary system. 
Regarded as a means of giving the offender a fresh start in life 
in new surroundings remote from his old bad associates and the 
memory of his crimes, transportation has much to recommend it, 
but it was clearly incompatible with colonial development. It 
was necessary to fall back on the prison system, and the efforts 
of reformers have been devoted to the task of making confine- 
ment—a thing soul-destructive in itseli—as nearly compatible 
es may be with the regeneration of the prisoner. These efforts 
have hardly passed the experimental stage, yet certain results 

1 Wines, p. 86. * Pike, 450. 

3 Pike, 7b.; Stephen, i. 474. Together with murder, treason, piracy 
with violence, and setting fire to dockyards and arsenals remain nominally 


capital offences. It will be remembered that a case of treason was recently 
tried and the death sentence formally passed, but very shortly commuted. 


LAW AND JUSTICE 127 


‘have emerged. The necessity for a classification which prevents 
the first offender from being contaminated by the hardened 
_gaol-bird, the benefits of action and practical employment, the 
superiority of hope to fear as a stimulus to good conduct and 
the consequent advantages to be found in allowing the convict 
means of improving his position and even shortening his sentence 
by good behaviour, are matters of general agreement. But it is 
clearly necessary to go further than this. The plan of imprison- 
ing a man for a longer or shorter term, and then, without asking 
what effect his experience is likely to have had on him, turning 
him loose again upon society, a broken human being less capable 
than ever of earning an honest living, cannot stand. The old 
way of hanging at least rid society of the criminal. It stood 
condemned for its utter barbarity, which was indirectly as 
harmful to society as it was cruel to the sufferer. The modern 
method is still a terrible penalty, at least to the better sort of 
criminals, and, far from relieving society of their presence, tends 
to harden and degrade them further. Hence judicious thinkers 
like Frederick Hill, in his report of 1839, soon recognized that 
a more thorough system was required. The offender must be 
reformed, and at need he must even be detained until he has 
given good promise of reformation, and society must help him 
back into honest ways.1 The most thoroughgoing attempt in 
this direction is that of the Elmira system, followed now in 
several American states, in which, the sentence being wholly or 
within limits indeterminate, the fate of the convict depends on 
his own exertions. He can raise himself from a lower to a higher 
grade by continued good behaviour, and, finally, can obtain 
liberation on parole.” 


14. Whatever the outcome of these experiments, the modern 
state stands committed to the humane method of criminal 
treatment, and could not revert to the old plan save at the risk 
of a general re-barbarization.. That being so, it is necessary to 


1 For the views of Frederick and Matthew Davenport Hill, see Wines, 
217, ete. 

2 Wines, p. 220, etc. 

3 The modern reform of the criminal law is not the first attempt known 
to history at a mitigation of punishment. The Classical Chinese books 
condemn excessive corporal punishment as an innovation (Shoo King, xxvii. 
3), and represent the practice of composition as a measure of mercy. It 
has, unfortunately, a darker side (see Legge, note, pp. 608-9). Confucius 
continually protests against governing the people by punishment, and 
declares that within 100 years a series of good rulers would be able to dis- 
pense with capital punishment. Under Buddhist influences King Asoka 
of Magadha abolished capital punishment, at first for certain crimes, 


128 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


push the new method through and to treat the criminal through- 
out as a “‘case’”’ to be understood and cured. We touch here 
the scientific conception underlying the modern theory of punish- 
ment. Crime, like everything else that men do or suffer, is the 
outcome of definite conditions. These conditions may be psycho- 
logical or physical, personal or social. They arise in the character 
of the agent as it has grown up in him from birth in interaction 
with the circumstances of his life. We may recognize them in 
social surroundings, in overcrowding or underfeeding, in the 
sense of despair produced by the denial of justice, or in the 
overweening insolence of social superiority. But whatever they 
may be, if we wish to prevent crime, we must discover the 
conditions operating to produce crime and act upon them. 
This does not destroy, but defines personal responsibility. The 
last link in the chain of causation which produces any act is 
always the disposition of the agent at the time of action, and 
unless dominated by ungovernable impulse,! this disposition is 
always modifiable by the introduction of a fresh motive as a 
weight in the scale. But though not destroyed, responsibility 
is transformed by science, and with it the whole conception of 
punishment.2, When a wicked act was held to be something 





and by the thirty-first year of his reign, altogether (Duncker, iv. 535). 
In the tenth and eleventh centuries a wave of feeling against capital 
punishment passed over Europe, but the feeling was religious rather 
than humanitarian, and allowed the substitution of savage mutilations. © 
Hence the Conqueror’s edict, ‘‘ Interdico etiam ne quis occidatur aut 
suspendatur pro aliqua culpa, sed eruantur oculi et testiculi abscidantur ” 
(Pollock and Maitland, i. 88,11. 461). The exchange was doubtful gain, and 
without legislation death resumed its place as the penalty for felony by 
the thirteenth century. Clerks continued to have difficulties of conscience 
as to drawing up capital sentences and avoided writing the decisive words, 
and the tradition, as every one knows, persisted through the great days of 
the religious Inquisition. What distinguishes the modern movement is 
that it rests neither on the mere sentiment of mercy, nor on any theory of 
the intrinsic wickedness of the taking of life, but on an attempt, however 
imperfect as yet, to render a scientific account of the causes of crime and 
the effects of punishment, both on the criminal and on society at large. 

1 This makes no exception to the general statement that character is the 
cause of action, since that paralysis of the will which leaves a man the sport 
of impulse is itself a matter of character. As to control of man’s conduct 
by heredity much nonsense is talked. Heredity is not a force controlling a 
man from without, but a short. expression for the supposed antecedent 
causes of the qualities which make him what he is, and by what he is, he is 
to be judged, so far as he is judged at all. 

2 Responsibility, properly understood, is definable as the capacity to be 
determined by an adequate motive. A man is responsible who knows what 
is expected of him, understands the consequences of his action, and is 
determined therein by that knowledge. Reward and punishment, praise 
and blame, are therefore justly awarded in so far as they affect action. 
Beyond this, retribution is inapplicable, and praise and blame pass into 
admiration and pity. 


LAW AND JUSTICE 129 


arising in a spontaneous arbitrary manner from the unmotived 
evil choice of a man, the vindictive retribution which is founded ° 
on instinct and fostered by the needs of early society seemed 
amply justified. When good and evil alike are seen to grow 
out of assignable antecedents by processes which calmly judging 
men can pretty closely foretell, to rest on laws of growth and 
disease which apply to character as other laws apply to the 
physical organism, to express the lack of imagination or low 
power of reasoning which makes men hard, cruel and unjust, 
or to flow from the over-excitement or insufficient satisfaction 
of physical impulses that makes them a prey to lust or alcohol, 
then every thinking man is made to feel in a new sense that 
but for the grace of conditions which he has only very partially 
and imperfectly controlled, there where the criminal passes to 
disgrace and misery goes he himself, the juryman, the judge, 
the newspaper reader who explodes in satisfaction over the‘ 
Swinging sentence. No one can fully face the problem of respon- 
sibility and become, however dimly, aware of the multitudinous 
roots from which character and conduct spring, without feeling 
the utter inadequacy of the retributive theory of punishment. 
Vindictiveness has its natural sphere in the stage at which 
crime is only known as an injury to be revenged. As soon as 
it becomes a wrong act to be punished, the nature of wrong 
and the meaning of punishment have to be reconsidered. If 
the first principle of rational ethics is that action can only be 
justified by doing good to those whom it affects, this principle 
receives a striking confirmation from the one quarter in- which 
its application might seem doubtful. For a natural impulse 
makes us desire to harm the wicked, but the history of criminal 
law and the philosophical analysis of responsibility combine to 
prove to us that this is the impulse of the old Adam and not 
warranted by reason or justice. Justice, in punishment as in 
other things, seeks the good of all whom it affects, of the criminal 
as of the injured party. Yet all true punishment inflicts pain, 
for precisely the truest punishment consists in the full realiza- 
tion of the character of what one has done. This realization, 
with all the mental misery that it involves, we may justly wish 
to be the lot of every criminal, whether convicted or unconvicted, 
whether despised or, like the greatest offenders, honoured by 
the world. So far pain is rightly attached to wrong-doing as, 
ethically speaking, its inevitable consequence. But any other 
sort of pain, any physical suffering that has no such healing 
moral effect, may gratify an animal thirst for vengeance, but 
has no solace for our moral thirst for the triumph, even in the 
K 


130 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


mind of the wrong-doer, of the righteousness which he has set 
at naught. 

_ The modern state upholds its members in the enjoyment of 
their rights and gives them redress for injuries to themselves in 
the civil courts. It also intervenes on its own motion to main- 
tain public order by the punishment of law-breakers. Religious 
and. political offences falling into the background, legal offences 
tend to be restricted to criminal acts, and punishment to be 
proportioned to the imputed degree of moral guilt But this 
ethical view of punishment, when pushed home, compels the 
admission that the individual theory of responsibility is no 
more final than the old collective theory, and punishment is 
compelled to justify itself by its actual effect on society in 
maintaining order without legalizing brutality, on the criminal 
in deterring him or in aiding his reform, in both relations as 
doing good, not as doing harm. The criminal, too, has his 
rights—the right to be punished, but so punished that he may 
be helped in the path of reform. 

Briefly to resume the main phases in the evolution of public 
justice, we find that at the outset pure anarchy or self-redress 
is qualified first by the sense of solidarity within the primary 
social unit. This expresses itself first in the repression of offences, 
especially of a sacral character, held dangerous to the group as a 
whole, and then in the control of self-redress. As between the 
primary units a system of collective self-redress arises which in 
turn yields to the authority of chief or council representing the 
larger community as a whole. As long as the vindication of 
rights rests mainly in the hands of the kindred or other group, 
responsibility is collective, intention is apt to be ignored and 
punishment is not assessed according to the merit of the indi- 
vidual. When retaliation is mitigated by the introduction of 
money payments no change in ethical principle occurs. It is” 
only as social order evolves an independent organ for the adjust- 
ment of disputes and the prevention of crime, that the ethical 
idea becomes separated out from the conflicting passions which © 
are its earlier husk, and step by step the individual is separated 
from his family, his intentions are taken into account, his formal 

+ The converse proposition that wicked acts are all treated as legal 
offences does not follow, nor is it true of the modern state. The questions 
as to the sphere of the state which arise here cannot be dealt with on thisy 
occasion. 

Offences against the public order do not constitute an exception to thal 
statement in the text. In themselves they are slight offences, and the 
penalty is always light, but the deliberate defiance of the public order is, 


of course, an immoral act unless justified by some bad end which that 
order may be made to serve. 





LAW AND JUSTICE 131 


rectitude or want of rectitude is thrown into the background by 
the essential justice of the case, appeals to magical processes are 
abandoned, and the law sets before itself the aim of discovering 
the facts and maintaining right or punishing wrong accordingly. 

‘The rise of public justice proper necessitates the gradual 
abandonment of the whole-conception of the trial as a struggle 
between two parties, and substitutes the idea of ascertaining 
the actual truth in order that. justice may be done. That is 
at first’ carried out by supernatural means, viz. by the Ordeal 
and the Oath. ‘These in turn give way to a true judicial inquiry 
by evidence and rational proof. The transition occurred in 
‘England mainly during the thirteenth century, the turning point 
being marked by the prohibition of the Ordeal by Innocent III. 
in 1215. The early stages of public justice administered by the 
recently developed central power led to excessive barbarity in 
‘the discovery and punishment of crime. It took some more 
centuries to prove to the world that efficacy in these relations 
could be reconciled with humanity and a rational consideration 
of the best means of getting at truth. By so long and round- 
‘about a process is a result, so simple and obvious to our minds, 
attained. 


We have thus dealt briefly with the development of the state 
organization for the maintenance of rights and the suppression 
of wrong-doing. We have now to consider the development of 
the principal rights to be maintained. In a large measure these 
group themselves in accordance with the main divisions into 
which human beings fall—divisions of sex, of community, of 
class, and so forth—and these divisions will guide us in the 
chapters now to come. Nothing so intimately affects the 
standard of obligation or throws so much light on the manner 
in which rights and duties are conceived as the degree in which 
they are affected by such distinctions. These will accordingly 
form the subjects of the three following chapters. There will 
remain certain general obligations, principally those arising out » 
of rights of property, which will require separate treatment. 


ia 


CHAPTER IV 
MARRIAGE AND THE POSITION OF WOMEN 


1. THe division of the sexes affects the standard of conduct in 


‘two ways. First, it gives rise to special relations, carrying with 
‘them special rights and duties. Secondly, it cuts every _people 
into.two-portions, and the legal and ethical position of these two 


portions is never wholly the same. In greater or less degree the 


een, 


rights and the duties of men and women differ, and the diver- 
gence is not confined to matters arising directly from the sex 
relation itself. Important as these differences are for an under- 
standing of ethical conceptions, they are themselves extremely 
difficult to ascertain and interpret. In no other department of 
ethics are the types of custom strewn in such disarray over 
the various stages of culture. Nowhere else is it so difficult 
to classify without bewildering ourselves by cross divisions. 
Nowhere else is a bald statement of the law so likely to mislead 
as to actual practice or living sentiment. For no other human 
relation is at once so personal, and so bound up by multitudin- 
ous threads with the forces and ideas, economic, religious and 
even political, which go to determine the structure of any society. 

The position of woman is not wholly to be judged by her 
condition as wife and mother. Often the unmarried woman has 
important rights which marriage takes away; often also the 
married woman acquires a degree of freedom and dignity which 
her unmarried sister lacks. Nor, conversely, is the position of 
the wife the sole question of importance in the law of marriage. 
Nevertheless the two questions are too nearly allied for separate | 
treatment, and in order to understand the position of women 
we must pass at once to a general consideration of the law and 
customs relating to marriage. 

It will help us to begin by distinguishing the principal ques- | 
tions to be asked about the marriage customs of any society. 
Thus we may classify marriage— 

(1) According to the number of parties to the union (mono- 
gamy, polygamy, etc.). 

(2) According to the restrictions on marriage (exogamy and 
endogamy). 


132 et | 


= Misa niticts eh 


MARRIAGE AND THE POSITION OF WOMEN 133 


(3) According to its stability (law of divorce). 

|. (4) By the methods of obtaining a husband or wife (e.g. 

| capture, purchase, contract). 

' (5) By the relations between husband and wife (in the family). 
The two last questions are closely related, and both have an 

_important bearing on the general position of women. Under 

_each head we shall see what are the principal forms of mar- 

| Tiage customs that exist, and which are the prevalent types in 

_ the savage and barbaric world. We shall then briefly trace the 

| history of marriage and of the position of women among civilized 


| peoples. 





















t 


2. I. We have to ask, first, in any community, who, or rather 
how many, are the possible parties to a marriage. Is it (a) a 
| union of one man with one woman, or (0) of one man with two or 
more women, or (c) of two or more men with one woman, or (d) of 
a group of men with a group of women, or (e) is it wholly irregular, 
_ the negation of union, promiscuity ? All these are types of mar- 
‘riage which exist or have existed, or at least have been alleged 
to exist. Further, they split up into sub-types. Polygyny, for 
example, the union of one man with two or more women, is 
‘found in the two fairly distinguishable types of polygamy proper. 
in which several women are alike wives, and concubinage, in 
which there is one chief and fully legitimate wife, and one 
or more in a subordinate and perhaps servile position.! The 
‘one type, moreover, shades off into the other by gradations 
according as the chief wife’s position is more or less fully de- 
fined,? and as that of the secondary wives is more or less servile. 


._ 1 In China there is only one chief wife. The others are secondary, but 
legitimate wives. The old Babylonian law recognizes one wife (allowing 
‘a second in case of her being invalided), with concubines who were to 
‘recognize the wife as mistress. The case of Leah and Rachel illustrates a 
family in which there were two legitimate wives as well as concubines. 
Mussulman law allows four legitimate wives and an indefinite number of 
concubines. The old Japanese law recognized polygamy with a head- 
wife (Post, i. 62; Kohler, Z. f. V. R., vi. 369). For instances among 
/uncivilized peoples, see Howard, i. 143-144, and Westermarck, p. 442, 
etc., and Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Straits, p. 230. 
There are borderland cases in which marriage proper seems to be mono- 
gamous, though concubinage is tolerated, e. g. among the Bali monogamy 
‘is the only legal marriage, but concubinage with unmarried slave girls is 
practised (Hake, p. 379). In other cases polygamy is in disfavour. Among 
the Kayans of Borneo it is limited to chiefs, and even for them “ public 
opinion does not easily condone a second wife ”’ (Hose and McDougall, i. 73). 
2 In some cases a second wife may only be taken if the first is childless, 
2. g. among peoples of the Punjab and the Dekkan, the Santals in Bengal, 
some Bombay tribes (Post, l.c.). Post also refers to Bulgarian and 
Montenegrin customs. 
Among the Malays, under the Semando form of marriage, the taking of a 


134 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


Polyandry, again, though far less common than polygamy, 
has many varieties. The several husbands may, and in the 
commonest case do, form a definite group. Generally, as in) 
the well-known case of Thibetan marriage, they are all brothers.?’ 
But this is not always so. Polyandry may merely take the form 
of permitting a woman to have many husbands without specify- 
ing any particular relationship between them except such as 
may follow indirectly from the other marriage regulations of 
the community. This is the case among the Nairs of the Malabar 
coast. The same people illustrate a still further variety, the 
combination of polyandry and polygamy. For as the Nair 
woman may have many husbands, so the Nair husband may 
have many wives. Again, in the relations between the husbands 
there are differences quite parallel to those which distinguish 
polygamy from concubinage. All the husbands, that is, may 
have equal rights, or there may be one chief husband and others 
inferior and secondary to him. Of such a character is the 
secondary husband who assumes both the rights and the duties 
of the proper husband in his absence among the Aleuts.2 Some 
peoples have the punishment—to our eyes the very paradoxical 








second wife is a ground of divorce, and at Mokomoko the husband must 
pay her a fine, 40 guiden (Waitz, v. 145, 146). Among the Khonds the 
wife’s consent is required (Reclus, Primitive Folk, p. 281). Post gives | 
similar instances among the Khyengs, the Tamils of Ceylon, and Punjab 
peoples (Post, i. 63, from Kohler, Z. f. V. &., vi. 192), and Howard 
(i. 144) quotes a case among the North American Indians. Among the | 
Touaregs the taking of a second wife is a ground of divorce (Letourneau, 
La Femme, p. 308). 

1 Among the Todas the wife belongs to the elder brother, but the 
younger brothers also have rights over her as they grow up, and an extra 
lover is permitted as well (Reclus, p. 196). Polyandry is, however, dis- 
appearing except among the indigent. Among the Santals the husband’s 
brother is admitted, but not too openly (Risley, ii. 229). According to _ 
Westermarck (p. 453) there are only three cases in Asia in which polyandry _ 
is not limited to brothers—viz. the Nairs, Khasias, and certain Cossacks, | 
but Letourneau (La Femme, p. 216) denies that it is strictly limited to | 
brothers in Thibet. | 

2 Compare Cesar’s account of the ancient Britons: ‘‘ Uxores habent 
deni duodenique inter se communes, et maxime fratres cum fratribus 
parentesque cum liberis; sed, si qui sunt ex his nati, eorum habentur 
liberi, a quibus primum virgines queque deducte sunt’? (B. G., v. 14). 
That is, there was a chief husband and the rest were secondary. Among { 
the polyandrous tribes of primitive Arabia the wife, according to Strabo, 
passed the night with the elder brother, but the others had access to her { 
(Starcke, p. 137). For the Nairs, see Reclus, 162. 

* Reclus, pp. 66-67. Among the Thlinkeets and Koloshes a youngalll 
brother is preferred for this purpose. Secondary husbands occur among” / 
the Papuas (Kohler, Z. f. V. R., 1900, p. 334). Among the Roucoyennes, 
the wife’s lover enters the husband’s household as a peito, something 
between a client and a serf (Coudreau, Revue d’EHthnog., vii. 479). 








MARRIAGE AND THE POSITION OF WOMEN 135 


punishment—for adultery that the paramour, on detection, is 
compelled to become a secondary husband and contribute to the 
maintenance of the family.t 


3. Of group marriage, again, more than one variety is ab- 
stractly possible, though as here the evidence becomes scantier 
it is not so easy to say which types, if any, have been actually 
represented in history. Indeed, it cannot be regarded as certain 
that any such institution as the actual marriage of two groups, as 
distinct from a combination of polygamy and polyandry with 
certain marriage taboos, has ever existed. As the whole subject 
is involved in controversy, it will be well to summarize what is 
actually found in a leading case. Among the Central Australian 
tribes two types of marriage custom have been distinguished by 
Messrs. Spencer and Gillen. The first, which specially concerns 
us, is that practised among the Urabunna, The tribe is divided 
into two classes, and these classes are exogamous—that is to 
say, @ man must not marry within his class, but must choose his 
wife from the other. Secondly, there are distinct totems within 
the tribe, and these are similarly exogamous. Thirdly, each of 


1 Among the Konyagas, if the paramour is a member of the husband’s 
family the latter may compel him to obey his orders and those of the wife, 
with whom henceforth the association is legitimate (Reclus, p. 67). 
Altogether Westermarck enumerates some thirty-six instances of tribes 
practising polyandry (p. 450). Among over 500 peoples studied we found 
only twenty-two cases, occurring, however, in all the grades of the simpler 
culture. To these must be added the people of Langerote and Porta- 
ventura in the Canary Islands in the sixteenth century (Letourneau, p. 303), 
and in antiquity the Arabs and British (Westermarck, p. 454). The case 
of the primitive Aryans in India is doubtful. The two Aswins in the Rig 
Veda win one damsel as the prize of a chariot race, and she acknowledges 
their “ husbandship.”’ In the Mahabharata Draupadi is won by the eldest 
of five Pandava princes and becomes the wife of them all, but her father 
describes this as “‘an unlawful act, contrary to usage and the Vedas.” 
The princes plead as precedent the case of a “most excellent moral 
woman,”’ who dwelt with seven saints, and of Varski, who cohabited with 
ten brothers “‘ whose souls had been purified with penance.” Mayne 
(Hindu Law and Usage, p. 64) points out that these were bad precedents, 
being cases of saints who were above ordinary laws. He adds that in the 
Ramayana polyandry is mentioned with abhorrence, and sums up in 
favour of the view that sexual looseness rather than recognized polyandry 
is indicated (Mayne, p. 65, 4th ed.). 

In Sparta a secondary husband was sometimes tolerated for the sake of 
increasing the family—oi uvdpes (BovAovTat) adeApods Tois maiol mpocrauBaver 
of To’ pey yévous Kal THs duvdmews KolVvwvodal, TOY 5E XpNnuaTwY ovK aYTLTOLODYTaL 
(Xenophon, Rep. Lac., i. 9, quoted in Grote, Part II. chap. vi. p. 520). 
Similarly, among the Punans, a Borneo jungle people of very primitive 
type, wives of elderly men take a second husband to obtain children 
(Hose and McDougall, ii. 185), and among the Bayaka in Africa, a childless 
husband may introduce his brother in secret (Torday and Joyce, J. A. I., 
xxxvi. 45). 


136 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


the two classes is divided into four groups, and in choosing a 
wife a man is restricted to one of these groups. How the group 
division is arrived at need not concern us for the present, The 
point is merely that there exists for any given group of men a 
definite group of women with whom they may marry, and who 
are called their Nupas. So far, then, our result is that there are 
in the tribe a group of men and of women who are Nupa to 
each other—that is, potential husbands and wives. ‘To come now 
to the actual marriage, a man will have one or more of his Nupas 
assigned to him as his wives. He will also have others to whom 
he is Piriaungaru—that is, he has access to them under certain 
conditions. Similarly, a woman may be Piriaungaru to several 
men, and lastly, a man may lend his wife to any of her Nupas, 
and on the occasion of a visit, for example, is expected as a matter 
of courtesy and good feeling to do so. Thus the husband has 
only, so to say, a preferential right in his wife, and the wife 
in the husband. The husband will have a secondary right to 
other women as his Piriaungaru, while his wives are in turn 
Piriaungaru to other men.1 


1 In the Dieri tribe there is both individual and group marriage. In 
the latter case the headman allots certain men and women (subject to the 
clan or totem restriction) to one another as Pirauru, but their rights, as 
the different husbands and wives are often members of different local 
groups, are exercised mainly when the groups meet. When they separate 
the right of the Noa or principal husband predominates (A. W. Howitt, 
The Organization of Australian Tribes, Transactions of Royal Society of 
Victoria, vol. i. Part IT. pp. 124-147). 

The custom of the Arunta and other Central Australian tribes is still 
further removed from a true group marriage, as here there are no 
Piriaungaru. A woman is restricted to one man unless he lends her. 
What suggests group marriage, apart from the nomenclature of relation- 
ships, is (1) that the name for wife is the group name Unawa, the term 
(corresponding to Nupa) applied to all women of the class with whom the 
man may lawfully marry; (2) that wives are freely lent within the group 
and enjoyed promiscuously at festivals. How much stress is to be laid on 
this is not easy to determine. It is certain that the class restrictions on 
marriage are held much more vital by most savages (whatever their marriage 
customs) than the marriage tie itself. Among the Australians, Messrs. 
Spencer and Gillen remark that jealousy is little developed, adultery is at 
most an infringement of rights of property (so also among North American 
Indians, see Waitz, iii. 131), wife-lending is habitual, and divorce is easy. 
Under these circumstances the very use of the term marriage can only be 
justified by the difficulty of finding any other. It is not marriage as we 
understand the relation, and the tie, whatever we call it, is exceedingly 
loose. On the other hand, the taboos which mark out special classes for 
each other are among the most sacred laws of the tribe. Generally speak- 


-\ 


ing, these restrictions are of a negative character—a man must not marry © 


within his totem, or his class, but sometimes, owing to the multiplication 
of restrictions, particularly in the form of classificatory relationships (of 
which the Australian class divisions are really a case), the result is to confine 
the intending spouse to a specific group. ‘This group will then consist of 


MARRIAGE AND THE POSITION OF WOMEN 137 


Now, as it stands, this scheme of marriage may be classified as 
a form of polyandry combined with polygamy, such as we have 





his Nupa or Unawa, and so it is easy for him to change his wife within the 
group and impossible for him to take one outside it; and as this applies to 
all the men and all the women we may say that the two groups are more 
strictly bound together than any individuals within it, and this we may, if 
we please, term group marriage. But the expression is undesirable unless 
deliberately intended to suggest the theory of an earlier form in which men 
and women were actually united by groups. 

The importance of this question lies in its association with the classifi- 
catory system of counting kinship. In name, an Australian has not one 
father, but a group of fathers, 7. e. all the potential husbands of his mother ; 
not one brother, but a group of brothers, 7. e. all the sons of his potential 
fathers, and so on. This system of names is widely spread, and points to 
some form of social organization which must have been very prevalent, if 
not universal, at a low stage of human development. (That the system, 
or rather systems, for they are of many kinds, cannot be explained 
linguistically but must rest on definite social relations between definite 
individuals and groups, has been conclusively shown by Dr. Rivers in 
his Kinship and Social Organization.) 'Those who uphold group marriage 
argue (1) that this method of reckoning kinship is the only possible method 
where group marriage exists, (2) that no other satisfactory explanation of 
_its origin and meaning has ever been put forward, (3) that we can under- 
stand its existence where individual marriage now prevails if we suppose 
group marriage to have existed previously. As to this argument it may 
be said (a) that the expression group marriage is misleading. At most we 
may contemplate marital relations as restricted to the members of two 
classes, and within the right class, rights of access verging upon com- 
munism. (6) There is no evidence, nor is it probable, that such limita- 
tions arise by restriction of a still more primitive communism. The more 
probable suggestion is that they are a modified form of exogamy (cp. 
Rivers, op. cit., pp. 70, 71). Given the avoidance of the nearest kin in 
marriage, the very simplest society involves at least two intermarrying 
families, A and B. By our methods of reckoning kinship and permitting 
the intermarriage of any cousins, these two families would become inter- 
twined, and would, in fact, form one kindred. But suppose descent 
reckoned through one parent, e. g. through the mother only, and marriage 
forbidden to all the maternal kin. Then the daughters of family A remain 
of the kindred A, and must marry the sons of B, and so it will be to the 
end of time. If other families, C and D, join the group, the young men 
and maidens will find favour in one another’s eyes, and the old men will 
have to find a way of regularizing relations. If some forcible young man 
of moiety A has carried off a damsel of family C, it would legitimize the 
proceeding to rank the females of family C with moiety B for marriage 
purposes. Thus it might come about that moieties extend beyond 
recognizable kinship. Further, in the family group we often find that a 
particular cousin is the appropriate mate, e.g. the mother’s brother’s 
daughter. All mothers’ brothers’ daughters, in fact, form a class within 
which the bride should be sought by every one of the group of their fathers’ 
sisters’sons. Thisis already a rudimentary class arrangement of marriage. 
Once again, suppose the group to be enlarged by the accession of a fresh 
family, and the young men to take wives among them. To regularize 
these marriages it will be necessary to rank these wives as of the same 
class as the cousins who were the appropriate partners for these young 
men. Then the same prohibitions and the same obligations will apply 

to parents of these brides as to parents of the bride originally designated. 


138 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


already met with among the Nairs, only complicated by the 
taboos which limit the intercourse of the sexes to the two groups 


which are Nupa to each other. It is possible to explain the © 


system as the relic of earlier customs where the two Nupa 
groups were actually married to each other, so that intercourse 
between them would be promiscuous. This, however, is an 
inference as to the probability of which others must determine. 
What we actually find is not this marriage of two groups, but 
exceedingly loose relations, polygamous and polyandrous, within 
the groups, combined with strict taboo outside them. 

Where the marital relation becomes very loose we approach 
promiscuity, or the sheer negation of marriage, as between all 
who are not separated from each other by any taboo. If such 
taboos also fail, we get complete promiscuity. Does this exist ? 
Dr. Westermarck! enumerates some thirty-one cases in which 
it has been alleged. But in the majority of these it is also 
denied by other authorities, and in several the allegation is 
known to be false. There remain a number of cases in which 
the marital relation is so loose that the husband sinks into the 
position of a lover, temporarily visiting the woman’s house and 
readily dismissed at will. Sheer promiscuity is probably to be 
regarded rather as the extreme of loosenessin the sexual relation 
than as a positive institution supported by social sanctions.” 





We thus get a class of potential wives and husbands, who are not necessarily 
blood-cousins, but who would number blood-cousins among them. The 
parents of the potential wives would be potential parents-in-law and would 
enjoy the respect or exercise the rights of such. The restriction of marriage 
to the single class would be a consequence of the original rule of cousin 
marriage. It would be not a new restriction but an enlargement of the 
rule that a man should marry one of his mother’s brother’s daughters, by 
constituting a class standing in the relation of mothers’ brothers’ daughters 
to the class of the man himself. 

Cases in which a man marries his wife’s sisters, or possibly certain other 
relatives, along with her are partial developments of polygamy rather 
than group marriages, and the institution of the Omaha, quoted by Kohler 
(Z. f. V. B., 1897, p. 320) as a case of group marriage, where a man marries 
the aunt or sister or niece of his wife, while on his death the widows pass 
to his brothers, is a combination of this form of polygamy with the levirate. 

1 Westermarck, pp. 52—55.., 

2 The statement of Herodotus about the Massagete (Book I. chap. 
ccxvi.) and of Cosmas of Prague (eleventh century A.D.) about the ancient 
Bohemians are reducible to this. Cosmas writes, ‘‘ Connubia erant com- 
munia. Nam more pecudum singulas ad noctes novos probant hymenzos, 
et surgente aurora ... ferrea amoris rumpunt vincula’”’ (Kovalevsky, 
Modern Customs and Ancient Laws of Russia, p. 10). Post gives as instances 


of peoples among whom “ marriage relations are almost unrecognizable,” 


tribes of California and the coast of Venezuela, aborigines of Brazil and some 
Peruvian tribes, six instances in Oceania, three in India, and four in Africa 
(Hthn. Jurisprudenz, i. 52). He adds further instances, making seven in 
all for Africa (Afrik. Juris., p. 301). Among the Wintuns of California, 





MARRIAGE AND THE POSITION OF WOMEN 139 


4. The looser types of marriage are almost, if not entirely, 
confined to savage and barbarous races. It is here, if anywhere, 
that we find promiscuity and group marriage. It is here, 
certainly, that we find the marital relationship so loose as to 
approach promiscuity and group marriage. It is here also that 
we find polyandry—a custom practised by no people with any 
pretension to civilization except the Thibetans and the ancient 
Spartans. Polygamy, on the other hand, while also very common 
among uncivilized peoples, may be said to dominate the middle 
civilizations, and monogamy the higher. But here we must 
distinguish. Polygamy may occur as a regular rule, limited 
only by the number of women available or by a man’s means of 
maintaining them. Or it may be rare though quite permissible. 
Often it is limited to chiefs, nobles, or rich men, and in general, 
unless the numbers of the sexes are very unequal, the majority of 
men will be found at any time living with one wife. In asking, 
then, whether polygamy prevails among a people, we must decide 
whether we are inquiring into the permission of polygamy or 
into the actual extent to which it is practised. From the ethical 
point of view the former is the more important question, and it 
is clear that monogamy can only be said to be strict customary 
law when polygamy is not only rare, but definitely forbidden. 
With these distinctions in view we made three divisions—of 
peoples where monogamy is regular, those where polygamy is 
occasional (being either restricted to a class or allowed only on 
conditions, or being in actual fact rare *), and those where it is 
general, 7. e. unrestricted in principle and in practice frequent. 
We then find that the permission of polygamy—that is, the two 
cases of general and occasional polygamy combined, preponderate 
heavily in all the lower economic grades, but there are from 10 to 





according to Powers, a man generally pays nothing for his wife, but merely 
“takes up with her.” If (not being a headman) he takes a second wife, 
the two wives fight till one is driven out, while the husband looks on 
and abides in the lodge of the conqueror or follows the vanquished as 
he chooses (Z'ribes of California, p. 238). Can this relation be called 
marriage ? 
1 @.g. among the Santals a second wife is only taken in case of sterility 
and with the first wife’s consent (Risley, 616). Kohler states that poly- 
gamy is only allowed with the consent of the first wife among some Papuan 
tribes (Z. f. V. R., 1900, p. 349). 

2 We make this entry, e.g. where we have statements such as the 
following: Polygamy permitted but not usual (Barea and Kunama— 
Munzinger, Ostafrikansche Studien, p. 524). The chief is referred to as 
having several wives, but no other information is given (Wafipa, Thompson, 
' ii. 220). The men mostly have one wife (The Sereres at Fadiouth, cf. 
R. @Ethn., ii. 15). Polygamy exceptional (Takue, Munzinger, p. 209). 
One wife is usual (Korwa, Crooke, tii. 324). 


140 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


20 per cent. of cases in each grade where monogamy is the rule, 
with the exception of the Pastoral peoples, among whom we only 


found one case,! and of the Higher Hunters, where the proportion — 


fell to 6 per cent. On the other hand, the practice of polygamy as 
measured by the number of instances which we class as ‘ “general ”’ 
extends almost continuously from the lowest Hunters upwards.? 
This bears out the view that, as a practice, polygamy is mainly a 
matter of wealth. As an AciGhed custom, however, it may be 
said to be prevalent, though not universal, throughout the un- 
civilized world. The only definite group of cases in which mono- 
gamy as strict custom preponderates is that of the jungle peoples 
of Asia and some of the corresponding tribes of Africa. Thus the 
wild Semang are monogamous,’ the Sakai perhaps so,* the Veddas® 
and Andamanese ® strictly. The Punans are not monogamous 
since they admit polyandry, but hold to monogyny except in 
marriage with other tribes.’?. In Africa we hear the same of some 
of the Pigmy people. The rule, however, is not universal. 
The majority of the African Pigmies would seem to have been 
polygamous or to have made little of marriage. The Kubus, 
even in the wild condition, are stated to have allowed polygamy, 
though, perhaps, rarely practising it,? and some of the Negritos 
practised concubinage. As far as we get any account rendered 
of the reason, it is economic. Thus, the Orang Bukit of Sungei 
Ujong have but one wife, but, according to Mr. F. W. Knocker, 
see no objection, except the difficulty of providing for them, to 
having two or three.!° Similarly of the “tame ’’ Semang, Messrs. 
Annandale and Robinson write that they usually practice mono- 
gamy for economic reasons. Indeed, those of these peoples who 
have come under Malay influence and taken to a rude agriculture, 
have in many cases also accepted polygamy. In any case it 
would be a mistake to base any large conclusions on this partial 
tendency to monogamy. The forest tribes, though economically 


1 The Tobas, a South American hunting people, who have acquired cattle 
from the Spaniards. 

* There is a drop in the lowest stage of agriculture, and the two pastoral 
stages are above the corresponding agricultural grades. 

3 Martin, p. 864. Martin, it should be said, denies that their monogamy 
is due to lack of passion and attributes it to self-restraint. Wilkinson, on 
the other hand, allows the Semang much less moral feeling. 

4 But cf. Skeat and Blagden, ii. p. 56. 5° Seligmann, p. 87. 

$.K. G, Man, J, A. d., xii. p. 135. 7 Hose and McDougall, ii. 183. 

8 “The Batuas of Lake Tanganyika’’ (Hutereau, Annales III, i. 3), 
the “ Wambuti of Ituri’’ (David, Globus, 1904, p. 196). On the other hand, 
Johnston finds conditioned polygamy, and a very frail tie verging upon 
promiscuity (Grenfell and the Congo, p. 674; Uganda Protectorate, p. 539). 

® Hagen, p. 133. Cs ae I., xxxvii. 293. 

11 J. A. I., xxxii. 417, ete. 


- 


MARRIAGE AND THE POSITION OF WOMEN 141 


very primitive, are formed, as may be seen, by a special and 
rather severe selection. They are the residue of those who have 
been driven further and further into the wilds by the pressure 
of stronger races or better organized communities, and their 
temperament and mode of life must be specially adapted to suit 
their particular circumstances, and as such is marked by gentle- 
ness, shyness, and timidity rather than by strength of passion. 
Possibly these causes have co-operated with the economic factor 
to secure among many of them a relatively favourable position 
for women, and, amongst other things, monogamous marriage. 
Amongst other Lower Hunters polygamy is permitted and the 
general position of women is unfavourable. This is true in 
general of the Australians, the Fuegians, the Bushmen, the 
Botocudos, and the Lower and Central Californian tribes, as well 
as of many other North and South American Indians, who are 
but little above the Lower Hunters in economic standing. We 
cannot associate any tendency to monogamy with the lowest 
culture, but only a partial tendency to monogyny (combined in 
an important group with the recognition of polyandry) in one 
particular development of that culture. In general terms, then, 
we may say that the permission of polygamy is the rule in all 
grades of the uncivilized world, but in so doing we must dis- 
tinguish between polygamy as a permitted custom and as a 
general practice ; and between an ethical monogamy based on the 
belief that it is wrong to have more than one wife, and an habitual 
monogamy based on the practical difficulty of obtaining and 
maintaining more than one wife.1 Polyandry, on the other hand, 
is by comparison an exceptional practice, the principal causes of 


1 Travellers and ethnologists sometimes describe people as monogamous 
who, in fact, are so only by prevailing habit. The Iroquois, for instance, 
always figure among monogamous peoples, and no doubt that form of 
marriage prevailed among them and became the strictrule. Thus, Morgan 
(League of the Iroquois, p. 324) states that polygamy was forbidden and 
never became a practice, but from Coldan’s account given in Schoolcraft’s 
work (i. 221), it appears that it existed, though rarely practised in his time. 
\ Repeatedly we hear that the mass of the people are monogamous, but that 
the chiefs or the wealthier tribesmen have several wives or concubines. 
This was the case with the ancient Germans. Polygamy was rare in practice 
but was legal. When, owing to general poverty and the equality of con- 
ditions—which would bar the making of exceptions in favour of rich men 
or chiefs—the practice of monogamy has become universal and as such is 
of long standing, it would harden into custom, and acquire the sanctity 
that custom possesses among simple peoples. As such we find it in all 
our grades except the pastoral, which, perhaps on account of the lowered 
industrial value, seems particularly conducive to a proprietary view of 
woman. Meanwhile, with the development of wealth, the practice of 
polygamy extends and prepares us for its importance in the lower and middle 
civilizations. 


142 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


which are most probably poverty and a deficiency in the number 
of women. On the evidence before us it is hardly to be described 
as an institution belonging to one of the great types of social 
organization. 


5. Il. Impediments lo Marriage. 

A quite distinct classification of marriage systems could be 
made on the basis of the prohibitions which almost everywhere 
restrict, in greater or less degree, the choice of a husband or 
wife. These prohibitions exhibit a rich variety of differences, 
and their meaning and origin are extremely obscure. We have 
already noted that they fall into two great divisions. On the 
one hand, there are restrictions forbidding marriage within a 


certain group—laws of exogamy ; on the other, and quite possibly 


among the same people, there are rules forbidding it outside a 
certain group—laws~of-endogamy. Both kinds of restriction 


appear in a great variety of forms. Thus, endogamy may take 


the form of prohibition to marry outside the clan, as in old days 
among the gypsies,! or the caste as in India, or even the family. 
In the ancient world foreigners could rarely intermarry unless 
their respective states had the jus connubii, and there were gener- 
ally barriers on the intermarriage of slave or serf with free men 
or women, and a social, if not a legal, bar on the marriage of 
noble and commoner. In the modern world legal barriers have 


for the most part disappeared, and, socially speaking, equality in ~ 


education alone is exacted.2, Far more various and difficult to 
understand are the rules of exogamy. Marriage may be forbidden 
within the totem, as among many North American Indians and 
some Australian tribes; within the clan, as among the Bahima ? 
and Somali,* etc.; within the village, as among the Battas°; 
or the tribe, as in Rotuma.® It may also be prohibited within 
the kindred, and here again great differences appear. All the 


1 Post, Grundriss, i. 33. See ib. for several instances in which it is the 
duty of relations to marry. I am not clear that it is distinctly forbidden 
to marry another than a relation. 

2 There are exceptions, such as the prohibition of marriage with negroes 
in twenty-two of the United States, with Indians in four states, with 
Mongolians in four states (Parly. Papers, Miscell., No. 2, 1894, p. 155). 
Otherwise the intermarrying of royal families is the principal exception. 
In the German code the marriage of a high noble with a commoner involves 
certain disabilities (Westermarck, 373). 

% Torday and Joyce, J. A. I., xxxvii. p. 105. 

4 Post, A. J., i. 383. 

5 Waitz, v. i. 186. 

® Gardiner, J. A. I., xxvii. 478. There appear to be sporadic cases of 
prohibition within the same caste, or the same religious division (see Post, 
Grundriss, i. 41). 


MARRIAGE AND THE POSITION OF WOMEN 143 


_ kindred, so far as relationship is traceable, may be prohibited, 
as among the Andamanese and the Yoruba.1 Or the prohibition 
"may be applied to all the kin on that side to which the greater 
importance is attached, as in the Brahmanic and Chinese pro- 
hibitions.2, Where relationships are of the “‘classificatory ’’ type, 
e.g. where the mother and all her sisters are addressed by the 
same name, while the daughters of all that group of women, again, 
have one form of address in common, the prohibition of marriage 
may extend to all members of the group, and society will divide 
itself into classes within which a man may marry, and classes 
within which the women are strictly taboo to him. This class 
division of society runs through the Australian peoples... Again, 
kinship may be reckoned by. degrees, as among ourselves, and 
exogamy may be enjoined for certain degrees only, while beyond 
them marriage is permitted. In point of fact, under one rule or 
another, prohibition of marriage within the first and second 
degrees (parent and child, or brother and sister) is almost uni- 
versal, if we take account only of the basis of relationship recog- 
nized by any given people. Thus, if the totem is exogamous, 
and passes by mother-right, all kindred through the mother will 
be excluded from marriage, but brother and sister by the same 
father will be no relations, and may intermarry. Indeed, if the 
principle is carried to its logical conclusion, the same will be 
true of father and daughter. On the other hand, the totemic 
prohibition may be eked out by a custom forbidding or dis- 
couraging the marriage of near relations as such. Thus, in 
New Britain we are told that though legally a man may marry 
his brother’s daughter, since she is not of his totem, yet in point 
of fact such unions excite great repugnance.* Apart from cases 
in which kinship is only reckoned on one side, so that inter- 
marriage is allowed within the half-blood, the permission of 
incest within the nearest degree appears very rare. Indeed, 
with this reservation we may say that the nearer the relation- 
ship (counting that of the son to his mother as closer than that 


1 Man, J. A. J., xii. 126. Ellis, Yoruba-speaking Peoples, p. 176. The 
Andamanese recognize adoption and affinity as bars, but, through want of 
records, fail to trace kinship beyond the third generation (Man, J. A. I., 
xii. 127). 

2 rat chap. ii. p. 52. If the clan is based on father-right, it will be 
seen that the prohibition to marry an agnate is, at least in theory, equivalent 
to prohibition of marriage within the clan. Identity of name, again, is 
taken as equivalent to common membership of a putative clan. 

8 Among fifty-three peoples examined by Tylor, who count relationship 
on the classificatory system, thirty-three are at present exogamous 
(J. A. I., xviii. 264). 

* Danks, J. A. I., xviii. 283. 


144 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


of daughter to father), the rarer is the failure to prohibit.1 Such 
failure probably occurs most often in consequence of a strongly 
endogamous tendency, in the form of a desire to maintain purity 
of blood. Hence we find cases of in-and-in breeding among 
royal families, e.g. in ancient Persia and Egypt, and among 
high castes, as the Ulitaos of Micronesia.2_ But the prohibitions 
may be carried far beyond the first and second degrees. The 
Roman Church still forbids marriage to third cousins, and the 
attempt was made to carry it much further. Again, affinity 
may or may not rank with relationship. In many cases a 
son inherits his father’s wives, with the exception of his own 
mother, along with the rest of the family property. We find 
the Jewish legislators and, later, Mohammed, setting themselves 
against this practice. On the other side, rules of affinity may 
be construed as severely as those of blood relationship. On this 
method an immense extension of the forbidden degrees was 
effected by the medieval church,’ which was still further widened 
by the creation of a spiritual affinity between god-parents of the 
same child. The effect of this complex mass of prohibitions was 
such that hardly any marriage was clearly valid, while dispensa- 
tions were and still are attainable allowing unions even between 
uncle and niece. Protestantism swept away this mass of pro- 
hibitions, and for the most part allowed marriage of first cousins, 
and confined the restrictions of affinity to the direct line.* 

Of these very various rules it seems possible to say three 


, things generally. Thefirst is that they tend to bar marriage — 


| between people who are bound together by some other important | 


relation. Thus the totem or the clan, which is exogamous, is also 
as a rule bound in a kind of brotherhood to mutual assistance. 
Secondly, the particular relation which is the commonest bar 


1 The marriage of father and daughter, as well as that of brother and 
sister, is said to be allowed among the Aleuts (Reclus, 65). According to 
Post (A. J.,i. 382), there is no case in which incest with a mother is allowed 
in Africa, but among the Wanyoro, sister and even daughter marriage 
occur. Incest between parents and children is also found in some South 
American tribes (Starcke, The Primitive Family, 224. Cf. Schmidt, 
Z. f. V. R., 1898, p. 304). 


2 Sister marriage was common in ancient Egypt (W. Max Miller, ~ 


Inebespoesie der alten Afgypten, pp. 7-8, and Waitz, v. ii. 111). For other 
instances, see Westermarck, 290. 

3 See Huth, Marriage of Near Kin, 117. Huth (op. cit., 120) instances 
the repudiation of Ingeburga of Denmark by Philip Augustus, on the ground 
that she belonged to a family which had previously intermarried with the 
family of Philip’s first wife. It is fair to say that in this instance the Popes 
procured Ingeburga’s restoration, 

4 The English prohibition of marriage with the wife’s sister was the most — 
conspicuous exception. 


MARRIAGE AND THE POSITION OF WOMEN 145 


is that based on blood kinship. Thirdly, the violation of the 
rules of exogamy, whatever they are, is genérally-regarded-with 
peculiar horror. It is often an object of public vengeance when 
no other crimes, except, perhaps, that of witchcraft, have been 
raised to that dignity, and in the civilized world the intensity of 
feeling which it excites in no way diminishes. 


6. Notwithstanding the great variation in the forms which it 
takes, the exogamic impulse seems to perform certain functions 
which are fairly constant. Thus (1) it checks in-and-in breed- 
ing, barring intermarriage with near kin and often, in the 
lower races, within the narrow limits of the clan or village, 
which in their isolation would otherwise become entirely filled 
with people related to one another by a network of cousinship. 
What, precisely, are the physical disadvantages of in-and-in 
breeding or the advantages of crossing is, however, harder to 
say than is popularly supposed, and it is probable that this bio- 
logical side of the matter is the least important of the functions 
served by exogamy.t But (2), as indicated above (chap. ii.), 
it has the important sociological function of binding distinct 
groups together. (3) A third function of more importance in 
the civilized world is of a distinctively ethical character. For 
us the prohibition of incest is the only form of exogamy which 
persists, and incest is a crime which affects us with a horror, of 
the kind we call instinctive, and which is certainly not weaker 
in civilized than in barbarous humanity. What is the meaning 
of this horror? It is too real and deeply rooted to be explained 
as a survival. It is not based on tradition and convention, for 
it is not felt in relation to many crimes which the laws forbid. 
Thus, among peoples who accept the law of the Roman Church, 
the marriage of cousins is forbidden, but frequently occurs. In 
our own country men may approve or condemn marriage with a 
deceased wife’s sister, but any one who should put it on a par 
with incest with a blood-sister would be a very abnormally con- 
stituted person. Is the horror, then, of incest instinctive? The 
usual objections to this view are based on a misunderstanding of 
instinct. It is said that the horror is not universal, and that 
the objects to which it is directed differ widely in different 
peoples. But many instincts in the animal kingdom fail in 
universality and are modifiable in their application. And, as 
we have seen, what is instinctive or hereditary in human nature 
becomes more and more a feature of character, a tendency or 
disposition to feel or act which obtains its actual direction from 

1 See the evidence, especially that of Mr. G. H. Darwin, collected in 
Huth’s Marriage of Near Kin, chap. vii. 

L 


146 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


experience, and especially from education and social tradition. 
So far as such tendencies are to be explained it must be by showing 
the function which they serve, and the physical or psychical 
mechanism on which they rest. The function which the horror 
Jof incest performs has been, in early stages, to bring and keep 
j\families together in society, and at all stages to maintain distinct, 
‘and therefore in healthy development, the deepest affections of 
imankind. As to its basis, it is quite possible that there is an 
element of physical repulsion at the core, but, apart from this, 
there are psychological factors on which contemporary investiga- 
tions of character throw some light. A sentiment is regarded as 
a system of emotions and ideas clustering about some object, 
and organized on lines of its own. If two distinct sentiments, 
as the parental and the sexual, come to bear upon the same object 
there is a collision between them, and the repulsion is felt as an 
emotional stress. In society the normal sentiment would have 
the upper hand, and its repugnance for the abnormal would 
reinforce the emotion in the individual, and would add (in this 
case) the shame of bringing social disgrace on one of his own kin. 
But religious ideas or social arrangements, working on the re- 
-pugnances between the parental and the sexual as a nucleus, 
might extend it to all cases which it classed with the parental, 
and the current association would be reflected under ordinary 
conditions in the individual consciousness. Thus, rules of exo- 
gamy will naturally vary in accordance with the basis of kinship 
and of such fictive kinship as that of the totem. But they will 
vary around the parental, and more particularly the maternal, 
relation as a centre. The relation of the child to its mother is 
the first strongly realized, and remains throughout history the 
most sacred of human relations. Hence it is that cases where 
breaches of that relation are tolerated are the rarest of all. We 
may take this relation as the starting point of the prohibitions, 
and then bear in mind that it is all in accordance with the ways 
of primitive thought to extend them to everything indirectly 
or remotely associated with the tabooed relation—e. g. to the 
mother’s children, her relatives, all of her totem or her name. 
The father may come into the account independently through 
the recognition of paternity or through contact with the mother, 
and starting from the paternal relation the taboo may be extended 
yn the same way. The eccentricities of exogamy, then, are ex- 
/plained as arising (1) from an unduly extended taboo, (2) from 
an insufficiently felt recognition of natural relations. ‘These are 
_the ordinary faults of excess and defect which characterize rude 
morality, and are, on the whole, removed as civilization advances. 


‘ees 


MARRIAGE AND THE POSITION OF WOMEN 147 


Thus, in earlier customs we find rules of endogamy restricting 
marriage by clan or caste exclusiveness, and of exogamy restrict- 
ing it by rules bearing an indirect or irregular relation to the 
natural feeling which we are led to conceive as their starting 
point. In more civilized ethics we find the first set of restric- 
tions nearly annihilated, and the latter reduced to a simple 
expression of the permanent feelings from which we suppose 
them to emanate. In both directions the more civilized ethics 
tends to discard rules which hamper the free exercise of choice 
‘In accordance with normal human feeling. 


7. Il. The Stability of the Marriage Relation. 

Not less important than the number of parties to the union 
is the permanence of the marriage tie, and on this basis it would 
be easy to make a classification cutting right across all others. 
_In many of the lower races, as we have already seen, the dis- 
solution of marriage is so easy and frequent that it becomes a 
question whether the term marriage is at all applicable. In 
other cases the marriage bond is as strictly regarded as in the 
Roman Church. Here, again, we cannot find a continuous and 
unbroken development in any single direction, but once more 
we can with tolerable accuracy lay down that certain tendencies 
predominate at given stages of culture. This will be clear if 
once again we begin by distinguishing the different possibilities, 
and then briefly indicate the stage of culture at which each is 

_or has been most frequently realized. 
_ Divorce may (1) be perfectly free to either party; (2) it may 
be free to both by mutual consent; (3) it may be absolutely at 
the will of the husband or (4) of the wife. Next, (5) it may be 
free to one party or both on obtaining the consent of the family, 
the clan, or a court; (6) it may be open to either party on certain 
conditions. These conditions are infinitely various, but we ought 
to distinguish, as cases differing in principle, (a) those in which 
the only condition_is of the nature of a fine, usually taking 
the form of forfeiture of dowry or the restoration of the bride 
price, and (b) those in which the essential condition is some 
fault or defect in the other party to the marriage.* Further, (c) 
it may be open on the same conditions to man and wife, or (d) 
on different conditions. Very often, in fact, it is free to the 
husband and allowed under conditions to the wife. (7) It may 


1 Not infrequently divorce is free only when the marriage is childless. 
Thus, among the Natchez, it was at the will of the husband till a child was 
born, after which there was no divorce (Le Petit, in the Jesuit Relations, 
vol. lxviii. p. 143). 


~ANY 


148 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


| be wholly forbidden, marriage being indissoluble. In this latter 
| case a Separation a mensa et toro is usually allowed, but sometimes 
| this, too, is forbidden. . 
Marriage is indissoluble among the Andamans, some Papuans 
of New Guinea, at Watubela, at Lampong in Sumatra, among 
the Igorrotes and Italones of the Philippines, the Veddahs of 
Ceylon,! the Ges of Brazil,? and in the Romish Church. 
Ordinarily, however, both in the civilized and uncivilized 
world marriage may be dissolved either at pleasure or under 
certain conditions. Among uncivilized peoples divorce is not 
infrequently free to either party. The man dismisses his wife 
without ceremony, or the discontented or injured woman leaves 
her husband’s house without more ado and runs back to her own 
relations,? or they part by mutual agreement. In the higher 
stages of barbarism and in primitive civilization the consolidation 
of the family under the growing power of the husband tends 
to make divorce rarer and more difficult. Sometimes it drops 
almost entirely out of use. Thus it was a Roman boast that, 


~ though divorce was not legally impossible, before the case of 


Sp. Carvilius Ruga in 231 B.c. no instance had been known since 
the foundation of the city. Sometimes, with less justice, the 
power of divorce is left to the husband and withheld from the 
wife. It may even remain entirely at the husband’s pleasure to 
send back the chattel which he has bought. Thus the Hebrew 
who found anything unseemly in*his wife merely gave her a 
writing of divorcement and had done with her. In other cases 
there was at least a pecuniary deterrent. The divorcing husband 
forfeited the dowry, or, if the fault was his, could not regain the 
bride price. He had to leave his wife all the gifts he had made to 
her, or, finally, if she had no such property of her own, he had 
to pay a definite sum. Again, if there were children, provision 
might be made for their maintenance, or the right of divorce 
itself might in this case be withdrawn.> Similarly, where the 
wife has the right of divorce, she may incur pecuniary forfeits, 
losing her dowry, or having to repay the bride price and return 
the presents made at or during marriage. 


1 I take the foregoing from Dr. Westermarck’s list, p. 517. He quotes 
Wilken’s opinion that the same held good of the Niasians and Bataks. 
2 von Martius, i. 290. 


3 Sometimes it is a condition that she returns the price paid for her, e. g. 


‘ 
é 


in Soulimana and frequently in Africa (Howard, i. 226). In other cases 


she leaves at will, e. gy. among the Bakairi (von der Steinen, p. 332). 


* This Post considers to be the rule under the clan organization of society 
(Post, Grundriss, ii. 117). ~— - 


Ht 


° e.g. according to Post (A. J., i. 434), among the Moorish tribes of the | 


Sahara and the Hottentots. 


a 


MARRIAGE AND THE POSITION OF WOMEN 149 


Such pecuniary penalties render marriage relatively stable ; but 


-a further step is taken when it is dissoluble only under assigned 
-conditions. ‘These, again, show extraordinary variations. The 


husband is generally able to divorce the wife for unfaithful- 
ness, very often for sterility, and sometimes! because she bears 
no sons; often, too, for disobedience, bodily defects, or what are 
considered moral failings. The wife, again, often has the right 
of leaving the husband in case of neglect, desertion, impotence, 
or cruelty—more rarely in case of unfaithfulness. As a rule, 
the divorced husband may marry again, but it is not always that 


the divorced wife has this right, especially under the system {” 


of marriage by purchase. Sometimes she is wholly prohibited 


from marrying ; sometimes she must refrain till she has the leave 
of her former lord and master. 


The customs of savage and uncivilized peoples as to divorce =~ 
vary in such wild profusion that it is very difficult to make any 


general statement with regard to them. It may, however, be 
said that, with the few exceptions mentioned, divorce is allowed ; 
that it is generally free to the husband on easy terms, and very 
often also to the wife, or to the two parties by mutual agree- 


as compared with those of the wife in this relation.* 


: & 

1 e.g. in Burmah (Post, Grundriss, ii. 114). 

2 In comparing the position of husband and wife, it must be borne in mind 
that divorce almost universally sets the husband free to marry again, while 
the wife, in a large number of cases, especially under marriage by purchase, 
is more or less narrowly restricted in this respect, so that, for her, divorce 
rather corresponds to what we call separation (Howard, A History of 
Matrimonial Institutions, i. 244, 245). 

3 Howard (i. 231) notes the influence of wife-purchase in this direction. 

4 Divorce among Savages.—Divorce is apparently either quite free or 
Open on very easy terms to either party among many North American 
Indians (Columbians, Howard, i. 238; Iroquois, Schoolcraft-Drake, 
i. 221; Upper Californians and Innuit, Kohler, Z. f. V. &., 1897, p. 368). 
Among the Yuroks divorce is very easily accomplished at the will of the 


husband (Powers, p. 56). In this last case the husband regains the bride 


price. Itis free to both parties among the Eskimo of Point Barrow and 
of Behring Straits and Pawnees (Howard, i. 227, 228). Among other 
tribes it is at the pleasure of the husband; [so stated of the North American 
Indian generally (Schoolcraft, i. 171); of the Oregons (7b., v. 654); of the 
Hupa (Powers, p. 85)—here the displeased husband gets back the bride 
price; of the Dakota (Howard, i. 232); and the Abipones (7b.). In the 
last case, however, it may lead to a feud]. Among other peoples the man 
must lose the bride price if he divorces without good cause (Thlinkeets, 
Kohler, Joc. cit.). Im some the wife can leave at pleasure. The Navajo 
women are said by Colonel Eaton (Schoolcraft, iv. 217) to leave their 
husbands on the slightest pretext. Among the Digger Indians the wife 


leaves the husband at pleasure (ib., 223). Among the Cegiha the wife’s 


_ment,? but is sometimes restricted to special cases, and that the \ 
development of the patriarchate, and particularly of marriage / )...« 
by purchase,® tended to increase the privileges of the husband 


~ 


150 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


* : it 
In order to classify the different customs as far as such great 
diversities allow, we bring under the head of Divorce at will cases 
an ih he ai a a ih EMT naM mT TEMA NTT UMO TTT Sri yrs | kT 
relations take her away if ill-treated (Howard, 228), and the Sioux and — 
Dakota women leave their husbands for unfaithfulness or other causes. 
Among the Upper Californians the deserted husband demands the return 
of the bride price. In the later form of marriage among the Creeks the 
bond holds for a year only. 
Among some tribes of tropical South America the power of the husband is 
more developed, and he can lend, give, prostitute, sell, or exchange his wife 
at pleasure (Schmidt, loc. cit., 1898, p. 297). In Brazil, according to 


 Anchieta (quoted in Howard, p. 228), the wife may leave at pleasure. So 


among the Moxos (7b., 239). The Bonak, Guanan, and Guatamalan women 
have similar freedom (authorities cited by Howard, p. 239). 

In Oceania divorce is generally easy, though there are one or two cases in 
which it appears to be unknown. In Polynesia divorce by mutual consent 
is lawful (Howard, p. 230). A Tongan husband divorces his wife by 
simply telling her to go (ib., p. 231). In Micronesia divorce is at the 
man’s pleasure, and the same is true of the Papuan peoples, among whom the © 
woman, if she flies, must return the bride price, while the husband, if in ~ 
earnest about it, can generally reclaim her from her relatives by the terrors . 


“<“<of witchcraft (Kohler, Z. f. V. R., 1900, p. 347). In the Torres Straits 


divorce appears to have been rare. Infidelity and sterility were the chie 
causes, but incompatibility of temper appears to have been recognized as; 
sufficient (Cambridge Expedition, p. 246). Among some Australians, as 


take her away (Mrs. Parker, p. 58). In the Boulia District a wife given 


‘to a man by the camp council could only be divorced with her consent 
(Roth, p. 181). In Western Victoria couples may separate by mutual con- 
/sent, but the husband wishing to divorce his wife must obtain the consent 
\of the chief men of his own and his wife’s tribe. She may also complain 
‘of his unfaithfulness and get him sent away for two or three moons — 


(Dawson, Australian Aborigines, quoted by Howard, pp. 229, 230). 

* In Africa divorce at the will of the husband is general (Post, A. J., i. 433). 
The corresponding right of the wife is rarer, but not infrequent. Some sixteen 
cases are enumerated by Post (Afrik. Jurisp., p. 436), but some of them are 
doubtful, or depend on special conditions. Among the Fantis, Foulahs, and 
Kaffirs (Post, A. J., p. 438), and in Kordofan and Baka (Post, A. J., p. 439), — 
the neglect or ill-treatment of the wife are good grounds of divorce. Among 
the Bogos her third flight is taken as final (Post, A. J., p. 437). In many © 
tribes the wife can be divorced for sterility (Post, A. J., p. 439), and among 
the Kimbundas the husband can be divorced for impotence (Post, A. J., 


“—~p. 441). Among the Mundombe divorce is rare, only occurring when, after 


two years, there is no child (Magyar, p. 23). Among the Mayombe it re- ~ 
quires the consent of the wife’s father (Overburgh, p. 254). In many cases 

compensation must be given by the party which dissolves the marriage, e. g. — 
among the Foulahs and the Kaffirs for groundless repudiation. In Bornu © 
the wife retains her dowry (Post, A. J., pp. 442-443). Among the Banyars ~ 
she receives a small sum and retains all the presents she has received 

(Post, A. J., p. 442). Among the Basutos, unless guilty of an offence, she — 
is entitled to support (Post, A. J., p. 442). In Egypt she can also claim © 
a certain provision, and in Abyssinia she can claim her dowry as well — 
(Post, A. J., p. 442). Among the Bogos she takes the household utensils © 
with her, among the Barea and Kunamashe has half the joint property, © 
and in Morocco asum awarded by the judge (Post, A. J., pp. 442, 443). — 
If the woman leaves the man, her family must return the bride price, and — 
perhaps more. But the question of compensation is very naturally affected — 





» the Euahlayi, the husband might send the wife back to her relations, and 4 
~ reclaim her child when old enough, while, if ill-treated, her relations might 


MARRIAGE AND THE POSITION OF WOMEN 151 


lin which (1) either party is free to dissolve the union, or (2) are 
subject to no check except the necessity of repaying the bride 





by the circumstances of the divorce. If the divorcing party has good 
grounds he or she pays less, or perhaps pays nothing. Thus, among the 
Kaffirs, Foulahs, Fantis, and in Kordofan the wife does not restore the 


bride price if she has good grounds for leaving her husband (Post, A. J...) "7 


p- 445). Among the Beni Amer, if it is the man who divorces, the woman’s 
property is divided, the husband taking his weapons, and the wife the 
house and contents. If the woman divorces the man for ill-treatment or 
infidelity, she gets only one-third of the common stock; if impotence is the 
cause she gets half (Post, A. J., p. 446). 

Among the Yoruba (where father-right holds) the husband can divorce 
the wife and reclaim the bride price if she is unfaithful; otherwise he 
loses the price. If he neglects the wife, she summons a palaver of her 
relatives, and if he persists, she may leave him. If he is of inferior rank 
he is liable to be flogged by her relations (Ellis, Yoruba Peoples, p. 187). 
Under mother-right, where the woman is not bought out of her family, 
the children often follow the mother in case of divorce. But this is not 
always the case, and sometimes the circumstances of the divorce determine 
the children’s future (Post, A. J., p. 447). 

No obstacle is offered to the re-marriage of the man, but under marriage 


by purchase the husband generally retains some control over the divorced ° 


wife. Among the Hottentots and Ashantis she cannot re-marry ; among the 


Banguns, not in the same village; among the Kaffirs, only if she had good .- 


grounds for leaving her husband; among the Marea and the Habub, not 
till her husband declares her free. Butin many cases (Post, A. J., p. 450, 
enumerates eight) apparently after a certain interval she is free to re-marry. 

On the whole, throughout Africa, marriage by purchase prevails, and the 
position of the wife is accordingly less favourable. 

Among the Indian Hill tribes the variations are great. The Nair wife 
may not only dismiss any of her twelve husbands at pleasure, but may even 
let him be sold into slavery for debt (Reclus, Primitive Folk, p. 158). 
Often divorce is free to either party. Instances are the Todas, Bodo 
and Dhimals (but here an adulteress must refund the bride price), and the 
Karens. Among the Badagas the wife may leave if she pleases, but the 
husband retains the children. He is also free to divorce her (Reclus, 
op. cit., p. 195). Among the Nagas there is a fine according to the cause 
of the divorce (Godden, J. A. J., xxvi. 177). Among the Santals divorce 
is rare, but is permitted to either party on obtaining the consent of 
the husband’s clan. Among the Khonds the wife may leave the husband 
on repaying the bride price. (In some tribes this privilege is restricted to 
the childless.) On the other hand, she can be divorced only for adultery 
or prolonged misconduct, and her consent is required if the husband wishes 
to take a concubine (Reclus, p. 280); and, a rare note in the savage world, 
infidelity on the part of the man is held dishonourable. 

Among the peoples of Central Asia divorce appears to be open to the 
man at pleasure and to the woman for persistent ill-treatment (Ratzel, 
vol. iii. p. 342; Letourneau, La Femme, p. 210). 

Among the Malays, divorce is greatly influenced by the form of marriage. 
In the Ambil Anak marriage the wife may divorce the husband. In the 
Djudjur marriage all the advantage is on his side, but she can generally 
escape from him if ill-treated. In the Semando form of marriage (see 
Waitz, v. 145) the taking of a second wife or concubine is a ground of 


Re 


divorce, and in one place (Mokomoko) this is the only form recognized ™ 


(Waitz, v. 145, etc.). Among the Battaks of East Sumatra there is no one- 
sided divorce, except for attempt to murder, and mutual agreement is 
required (Howard, p. 229). 


oO” 


, 152 | MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


, price, or (3) marriage may be dissolved by mutual consent. 
| Next we put together those in which divorce is free to the husband 
eee either denied to the wife or open to her only on conditions. , 
|Next are those in which it is open to the wife but not to the 

husband.!_ Then there are those in which it is conditioned in 
/various ways, and, finally, those in which it is indissoluble. In 
| upwards of 270 cases we found 2 the following percentage for each 
, class— 


~~ Divorce by consent or at will of either party. . °48 
} At will of husband.) ) 2 
i At will of wife) 2.0 9. 1.) 0 9) ge Se 
Conditioned...) 5) 1 OL 


a 


Marriage indissoluble .  . ). & \ sis) pee 


These proportions were pretty evenly distributed among the 
different grades, except the Higher Hunters, where the two first 
classes account for 86 per cent. of the whole. If we add these 

classes together in the above table as representing the unstable 
form of marriage, we see that they account for 71 per cent. of 
the whole, and as the lowest figure we get for any grade is *625 
in the Higher Pastoral, where the number of instances is very 
small, we seem justified in saying (1) that, roughly, in seven 
peoples out of ten, marriage in the uncivilized world can be 
dissolved at the will either of one partner or of both; (2) that 

this relation is roughly constant from the lowest to the highest 

economic grades within these limits. Thus, in the uncivilized 
world, the marital relation is more often than not a loose tie, 
undone with relative ease. 


8. IV. Further light is thrown on the structure of the family 
by the methods of arranging a marriage. These may be grouped 
under the following heads— 

/a. Capture. 
, 6. Consideration rendered for the bride. 

c. Consent of the parties. 


1 We only found two cases under this head. Sometimes we are only 
told explicitly that the wife may leave, but we presume from the general 
account of the husband’s position that his countervailing right is so clear 
as not to have needed statement (see, e. g. Latcham on the Araucanians, 
J. A. I., xxxix. 359). Among the Irulas, however, Harkness states that 
divorce was mainly at the option of the wife (Thurston, s. v. Irulas, vol. ii. 

. 379). 
Pe Simpler Peoples, p. 164. 


MARRIAGE AND THE POSITION OF WOMEN 153 


A few words may be said here of the general character of these 
methods, while their bearing upon the marriage relation will be 
further discussed in the following section. 

a. Marriage by capture is a somewhat ambiguous term. The 
practice of taking women captives in war or in petty raids is 
widely diffused over the savage world. In the genuine and 
unadulterated form of carrying off a bride from a strange tribe 
against her will and that of her relations, it occurs, according to 

_ Professor Tyler, in some forty cases.1 From this genuine capture 
{i Professor Tyler distinguishes connubial and formal capture. 
Connubial capture is not a mere form, but is a recognized 
method of obtaining a bride between families living at peace 
with one another, and is not regarded as a sufficient ground of 
quarrel. Of this Professor Tylor finds forty-six cases.2 Finally, 
he enumerates forty-four cases in which the form of capture is 
retained without the reality as part of the wedding ceremony. 

One illustration will suffice: ‘Among the Bedouin of Sinai 
the bridegroom seizes the woman whom he has legally pur- 
chased, drags her into his father’s tent, lifts her, violently 
struggling, upon his camel, holds her fast while he bears her 
away, and finally pulls her forcibly into his house, though her 
powerful resistance may be the occasion of serious wounds.” ® 
In other cases the resistance is less determined, and the form 
of capture is reduced to a mere symbolical act. The wide 
prevalence of these forms led McLennan and others to the 
belief that capture was originally universal; but this opinion 
is now abandoned. Capture, as we shall see further, is incom- 
patible in principle with the widely-diffused primitive system 
of mother-right, and its existence as a form may be explained 
in many instances by the necessity of a symbolic act to express 
appropriation. 'The symbol, in fact, is not necessarily a survival 
of something more real, but may be rather a legal expression of 
the character of the act performed. 

b. Consideration rendered—The more ordinary method of 


1 As an incident of savage warfare it is probably more frequent. A long 
list of instances of the practice is given in Howard, vol. i. p. 158. From 
Cape Horn to Hudson’s Bay women are regarded as legitimate booty. The 
practice of capture prevails throughout Melanesia, has existed throughout 
Tasmania, New Zealand, Samoa, New Guinea, among the Fiji Islanders, 
the Indian Archipelago, and to a limited extent in Australia; it is found 
occasionally in Africa, and in various ancient nations. 

2 In 435 peoples of whose forms of marriage we obtained information, 
we found only forty-one cases in all of capture as a reality, and many of 
these were only “ occasional” or partial cases (Simpler Societies, p. 154). 
But see previous note. 

3 Howard, i. 165, 166. 


154 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


, obtaining a bride is in one way or another to pay for her. (1) In 
| many cases the payment is a true purchase. Where this method 
* is fully developed the unmarried girl is not her own mistress. 
She is one of the family; more, she is the property of the family 
or of the family’s representative—the governing male, her father, 
brother, guardian, whoever he may be. She is an asset of a 
certain value to the family, the amount depending partly on 
her attractiveness, partly on her labour, partly on the scarcity 
of the article. This article can be sold for so much, and the 
purchaser naturally becomes wholly possessed of what he 
buys. 
(2) But in many instances the transaction is of a less com- 
eae character and more fitting to the dignity of the bride. 
‘Gifts are made to the bride’s parents, but they are regarded 
rather as compensation ? for the loss of a member of their house- 
hold than as a price by which the husband acquires the rights of 
an owner.® 
_(3) The gifts of the husband or his family may be balanced by 
return gifts, which may equal or even exceed the original gifts 
_in value. It is sometimes assumed that this exchange is a 
modification of purchase, and that it is through the increase of 
the return gift that the opposite practice of the dowry arises. It 
is equally possible that the exchange of presents arises inde- 
pendently in connection with marriage by free consent of the 
parties as a method of cementing the union of the two families. 
We may call this system one of the exchange of presents,> but 
in the concrete it is often hard to draw the line between it and 
the previous class, where such complimentary presents are often 
made in return. Wherever gifts of serious value are exchanged, 
it must be admitted that the whole proceeding bears something 
of the character of a commercial transaction, in which the girl, 


* It should he noted, however, that the system may be greatly modified 
by the usage of assigning the-price to the woman as her own property, as 
in Mohammedan countries (R. Smith, Kinship, etc., 2nd edition, p. 121. 
Cf. Cook, Moses and Hammurabi, p. 83). 

2 e.g. among the Bushongo we are told that a bride is not bought, but 
it is conceived just that compensation should be given for her. Her consent 
is necessary (Torday and Joyce, Annales, Serie III. p. 11). 

3 These gifts to the parents may coincide with the actual arrangement of 
the marriage by free courtship, as among the Omaha (Dorsey, R. B. L#., 
ili. 260). 

* Among the Wambugwe the suitor sends the bride’s father an ox, but 
he, if he agrees to the marriage, endows her with oxen, so that the dowry 
exceeds the bride price if it is to be so called (Baumann, M assailand, p. 187). 

5 Again, the present may be-very trivial, e.g. among the Watatura it 
consists of a pot of honey (Baumann, Massailand, p. 172). We should 
regard this as merely a compliment. 


MARRIAGE AND THE POSITION OF WOMEN 155 


so to Say, is an item on one side of the account.1__ Thisis especially 


the case if it is clear that the bride’s family get the more valuable 
presents.” 
fate Service.—Where the husband is not able to pay for the 
wife he sometimes receives her on credit, and in default of the 
possibility of payment may work out his debt in the form of 
service. This practice is familiar to us from the case of Jacob, 
and is found to this day in many parts of the world.2 In this 
case the husband enters the wife’s family for the period of his 
service, which, being concluded, he returns to his own people and 
sets up house on his own account. But while residing with his 
wife’s relations the husband is rather a tolerated visitor than the 
lord and master of his own family. Indeed, he is but partially 
tolerated, for this residence in the wife’s home is frequently 
associated with the taboo separating the husband from the 
wife’s relations. They are bound to mutual avoidance because, 
as being generally members of separate totems or clans, they are 
in theory enemies. On the other hand, when the service is com- 
pleted and Jacob has led Leah and Rachel to his own home, 
his authority is vindicated and he has whatever rights the 
custom of the tribe allows. The sustaining cause of this form of 
matriage appears to be principally economic. The man serves 
because he has not the property to buy a wife, and so we find 
marriage by service existing side by side with marriage by. 
purchase. — 

(5) Exchange—By the side of the exchange of gifts, which we 
@ught, on the whole, to rule out of the cases of ‘‘ consideration,” 


1 In the Torres Straits, apparently the gifts are ultimately balanced by 
return presents, yet the transaction seems to retain a commercial character. 
The chief Maino told Dr. Haddon that he paid for his wife a camphor-wood 
chest with seven bolts of calico, one dozen shirts, one dozen singlets, one 
dozen trousers, one dozen handkerchiefs, two dozen tomahawks, one dozen 
hooks, two fish-lines, one long fish spear, one pound of tobacco, two pearl 


_ shells, and “‘ by golly, he too dear ! ”’ (Cambridge Expedition, p. 231). 


2 e.g. among the Wambugwe (Baumann, Massailand, p. 187). 


‘ 8 In Africa among the Quoja, Fantis, Banyai, Edeyahs, and in Futatoro, 


also among the Zulus and Basuto. It is found in North America among the 
Aleuts and other Indian tribes; in South America among the Brazilians ; 
and in the backward tribes of Asia among the Nagas of Assam, the Kookis, 
and among other hill tribes, also among the Tunguses, the Ainu, the 
Kamchadeles, and the aborigines of China; among the Dyaks and some of 
the Philippinos, and here and there in Oceania (Westermarck, Human 
Marriage, 390; and Post, A. J., i. 378). 

4 Among the Yurok in California the purchase money might be only 
half paid, and the husband then would enter the wife’s tent in a 
semi-servile position. This would only be accepted by “‘soft”’ fellows 
(Powers, p. 56). We find a similar half-marriage among the Hupa 
(Goddard, i. p. 56). 


156 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


we have frequently a much less dignified transaction in which 
one girl is exchanged for another. Thus A, marrying B’s sister, 
must give B his own sister in exchange. This is particularly 
common among the Australians, where it often provided a satis- 
moe conclusion to an elopement. . 

. Consent.—In all grades of culture the human factor has its 
ne in the arrangement of marriage, and in some cases the agree- 
ment of the parties is sufficient to determine a union. Even 
where capture or purchase is developed, this factor cannot be 
wholly eliminated. A pair who are determined on having each 
other will settle all questions of right, in the savage as in the 
civilized world, by elopement. The actual influence of the 
woman’s wishes is, of course, often a question of fact rather than 
of right. For example, all over Australia we find elopement a 
common method of arranging a marriage. The girl has perhaps 
been betrothed as an infant to a boy or even to a man who, when 
she is ready to marry, will be middle-aged. She dislikes him and 
goes off with a lover. Her relations and her lawful husband give 
chase. A fight ensues and she is more or less severely beaten. 
She is brought back and runs away again, and then is allowed her 
own way,” or there is a fight between her lover and her betrothed,? 
or perhaps the lover lets her relations throw spears at him or beat 
him on the head, and then is allowed to keep her, giving, it may 
be, a sister in exchange.* Possibly, if the couple stayed away 
for a year or two till a child was born, nothing at all would be 
done to them.’ In all these cases abduction is illicit, yet it is 
extremely common, and the punishment tends to resolve itself 
into formal expiation. In other parts of the world we hear of 
elopements as being the less honourable form of marriage, pro- 
priety requiring that the matter should be settled by the parents.® 
Such a view is not unknown to civilized mankind. Not infre- 
quently there is child betrothal, yet a grown-up girl may exercise 


1 Thus, at Encounter Bay, marriage by barter of female relatives was 
the regular custom (W. Meyer, in Woods, p. 190). In Gippsland, sisters 
were exchanged (Bulmer, ap. Brough Smyth, i. 84). A girl who eloped 
might be severely handled by her brothers, because they lost thereby the 
means of gaining a wife for one of themselves (e. g. among the Wakelbura, 
Howitt, p. 222). This partly explains the compensation allowed even in 
case of unlawful marriage among the Euahlayi (Mrs. Parker, p. 79; see 
above, chap. iii. p. 90). 

2 e.g. in N. 8. Wales (Fraser, p. 90). 

3 As among the Yerkla-mining (Howitt, p. 258). 

4 As among the Wotjobaluk (Howitt, p. 246). Among the Waimbiio 
the matter was settled by the lover letting all her male relations knock him 
on the head (Bulmer, K. and K., App. I.). 

5 So among the Yuin (Howitt, 263). 

§ e.g. among the Omaha (Dorsey, op. cit., p. 242). 


MARRIAGE AND THE POSITION OF WOMEN 157 


choice.t Marriage may be by purchase, and yet the girl’s inclina- 
tion is not forced.?, Thus the question of consent is no simple 
one. Grouping as far as possible the cases in which consent 
seemed in principle to be required and those in which it might 
often be a factor but in principle was not required,4 we found 
103 cases of the former and 814 of the latter, and we found 
that the proportion in which consent was ignored was highest 
among the Hunting and Pastoral people, and materially lower 
in Agricultural societies. In this respect the position of 
women improves, so far as our evidence goes, in passing from 


1 e.g. among the Garo (Dalton, p. 64), the Basonge Meno (Annales, 
Series III. Tome 2. pp. 271, 272), and the Tshi (Ellis, pp. 282, 285). 

2 As it would seem among the Santals (Dalton, p. 215), and the Munda 
Kols—if the gifts in this case amounted to purchase (Selinghaus, Z. f. Hthn., 
ii. 326), etc. 

% Often the most opposite customs occur in the same tribe, e. g. capture, 
purchase and choice by the woman among the Digger Indians (Schoolcraft, 
iv. 223), and this is merely what the facts of human nature would lead 
us to anticipate. Elopement and a peculiar form of child betrothal co-exist 
among the Central Australians, and by way of exception they also have 
marriage by capture (Spencer and Gillen, p. 104). In the Marquesas 
Islands, Letourneau remarks that the parents’ objections are often overcome 
by the pair decamping together (La Femme, p. 106). This is a remedy 
known to the civilized world as well, but it proves nothing as to law or 
custom. Matters are more strictly defined among the Oregon Indians, 
where marriage is by purchase, and if, as will happen, a runaway match 
occurs, the woman is looked down on as a prostitute (Schoolcraft, v. 
655). 

In many cases child betrothal co-exists with the right of choice by the 
grown-up woman. Thus, among the Yoruba, according to Captain A. B. 
Ellis (The Yoruba-speaking Peoples, pp. 183-185), there is child betrothal, 
but a woman cannot be forced into marriage though she may be prevented 
from it. Among the Ainu, Batchelor (p. 141) notes child betrothal as an 
occasional practice now extinct, marriage going now in the main by the 
consent of the parties. 

Post (Afrik. Jurisp., i. 364 and 371), who notes eight cases in Africa 
where the bride’s consent is required, remarks that practically the consent 
of the guardians is also necessary, but information is scanty. The Yoruba, 
quoted above, would be a case in point. 

The means of securing consent are often sufficiently savage; e. g. accord- 
ing to Post (loc. cit., p. 363), the reluctant Hottentot maiden must pass a 
night with the lover and become his wife if he succeeds in ravishing her. 
Among the Mandingos the girl has the option of remaining unmarried, and 
if ever given to another, her first lover may make her his slave. 

A variant to the ordinary case of the disposal of a girl by her parents 
occurs when a man acquires a right to a woman by his position. This 
appears under the Levirate and also in cases like that of the Oregon 
Indians, where marrying an eldest daughter entitles a man to.all her 
sisters, even if one of them be already the wife of another (Schoolcraft, 
v. 654). 

4 A difficult case to classify is that of the Gonds, where elopement 
is a recognized right, but a deserted lover may carry a girl off by force 
(Crooke, vol. ii. p. 434). On the balance we enter this on the negative 
side. 


158 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


the hunting to the agricultural state, but undergoes a reaction in 
the pastoral. 

In a list of 435 tribes of whose form of marriage we have some 
information, we find 3014 cases clear or probable in which a 
consideration is given for the bride. We have 41 cases of capture, 
184 of the exchange of presents, 30 in which consent of the 
parties is the only ‘factor mentioned, 514 in which all we have 
learnt is that the relations arrange the marriage, and 11 in which 
we hear only of some intervention on the part of the chief or the 
old menofthecommunity.1 In the last two cases we may assume 
that our information is incomplete, and probably the same 
would be true of many of the 30 instances in which consent is 
the only point specified. Most of the cases in which relatives 
arrange the marriage would probably involve some consideration. 
We shall be within thé mark if we say that in three cases out of 
four marriage is arranged by that method. But the proportion 
increases as we ascend the scale, rising from °46 of all cases among 
the Lower Hunters to *81 among the Higher Agriculturists and 
°88 among the Higher Pastoral. Still more marked is the increase 
of Purchase, of which we have 219 cases in all, or just about half 
of the total, but a proportion of ‘1 only among the Lower Hunters, 
and of -69 in the Higher Agriculture. The development in the 
Pastoral peoples is again more marked, there being 16 clear and 
one probable case out of 20 in the higher grade. Thus “con- 
sideration ’’ in general, and purchase in particular, are modes of 
obtaining a wife which begin in the lowest grade and increase, 
as might be expected, with the economic development, being 
especially common in pastoral society. 


9. V. Relations of husband and wife. 

In the structure of the family three main types may be desig- 
nated. ‘In the first the natural family, by which I mean husband, 
wife and children, is not “complete ; husband and wife are not 
united in the sense in which they become legally and morally 
one flesh in the higher forms of marriage. This form of marriage, 
of course, corresponds to the maternal clan system. In _ the. 
second form of marriage the natural family is complete,.and 
the-husband is the head; but it is completed at- the cost-of the 
greater subjection of the wife, who, in passing into the husband’s 


family, merges her personality in his, often almost like a slave. _ 


1 The figures exceed the total of 435 because most of the cases of capture 
overlap others. The fractions express partial instances, and those where 
there is some element of doubt. 


es 


MARRIAGE AND THE POSITION OF WOMEN 159 


In the third form of marriage the union of the family is main- _ 
_ tained by the’ closest moral bond, but the full legal. and_moral. 
SOatity of the wife, as well as of the husband, is preserved. 
= third form of marriage must be regarded as a type or as an 
deal rather than as an actuality.1 To achieve it is a problem 
which civilization has yet to solve, since the solution involves a 
certain reconciliation of contradictories ; and if we wish to recog- 
nize any types of marriage as belonging to this class we must 
exercise a little liberality and admit all such as make a bona fide 
effort towards the solution. These efforts belong, in the main, 
to the story of civilized marriage. We have first to consider the 
two lower forms, which together dominate the uncivilized world. 
In the early stages of historical investigation into the beginnings 
of civilization it was thought that society arose out of the patri- 
archal family, and that in Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, or again 
in the Roman paterfamilias, as we reconstruct him from the laws 
of the XII Tables and what we know of earlier Roman law, we 
have a type of primitive human government. The researches of 
Bachofen, McLennan, Morgan, and others opened up an entirely 
new field of speculation. It was shown that the lower we go 
in the scale of civilization the more prevalent we find a type of 
organization which is in many ways the opposite of patriarchal, 
putting the mother for many purposes into the father’s position. 
Amongst civilized nations which have passed out of this stage 
we find indubitable traces of their having gone through it at 
an earlier period. ‘These observations led to the setting up of a 
matriarchal, as opposed to the patriarchal theory, and to the 
belief that in the dim red dawn of man there was a golden age 
of woman, which later on passed into the iron age of male despot- 
ism. The facts were sound, but the inference drawn from them 
was precarious, for it was not sufficiently recognized that there 
was a distinction between matriarchy, the rule of the mother, 
and what I have spoken of already as mother-right, rights going 
through the mother and dependent onthe mother. What is really 
common among the simpler peoples, is not matriarchy, but 
mother-right, and along with mother-right, and where it most 
flourishes, it is perfectly possible for the position of women to be 


1 I do not add the religious conception of marriage (as a sacrament) 
as a fourth type, because the religious (or magical) conception is 
present at each stage as a basis or framework for law or custom rather 
than as an independent form of the marriage relation. At the same 
time, these religious conceptions, particularly under Christianity, have 
deeply affected the actual contents of the law, and in relation to the 
permanence of the union may be said to have constituted a special 


type. 


160 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


, a8 low as the greatest misogynist could desire. The actual number 
| of cases in which the woman has a controlling or even an equal 
position are very few. I will mention one or two of them later 
on. As a general rule, where the father is not head of the 
household that place is taken by the wife’s brother, and the 
maternally organized clan consists of units composed each of a 
woman, her brothers, and her children. The woman is not 
necessarily any better off because she is ruled by a brother in 
place of a husband. 
/ Let us set the two types of family in contrast. Under mother- 
{right the wife, under father-right the husband, is the pivot on 
‘which the family relationships turn. Under mother-right the 
| wife remains a member of her own family. Under father-right 
she passes out of her family altogether, she is even separated 
from the family cult and family gods, her husband’s people are 
her people and his gods her gods. Under mother-right the 
husband goes to live with the wife’s people, the children take the 
mother’s name and belong to her kindred. In cases of divorce 
they follow the mother. It is the mother’s family which protects 
them. Her brother is their natural guardian, and exercises 
all the rights and duties which may belong to that position. 
The maternal kinsfolk stand together in the blood feud, they 
and not the husband protect or avenge the wife and her children. 
They may even protect her and them from the husband himself. 
In extreme cases the children are not held to be related to their 
father or to their father’s family at all, whence in some peoples, 
half-brother and half-sister may intermarry, as in the well-known 
case of Abraham and Sarah.t Under father-right, on the con- 
trary, it is relationship through the male which counts. The 
father is the natural guardian and protector of the children and 
in case of divorce retains them. It is to him and his kin that 
wife and children look for protection. In extreme cases it is 
only such relationship that is regarded. The wife and her 
children cease to have claims on her family, while relationship 
to the male ancestors and descendants is traced to the remotest 
degrees. These consequences of the strict principle of father-— 
right, however, are seldom pushed to the full length. Relation- 
ship through the mother is generally a bar to marriage, though 


1 Similarly, among the Spartans, children of the same mother might 
marry, but not those of the same father. The Samoyedes had a similar — 
rule (Post, ii. 60). But these logical consequences are by no means 
always pressed. The actual facts of kinship have their weight. Thus, to 
take a single instance, in New Britain a man may legally marry his brother’s 
daughter, but in practice is restrained by the general feeling of repugnance 
to such unions (Danks, J. A. I., xviii. 283). 


aa 


MARRIAGE AND THE POSITION OF WOMEN 16i 


the degrees are not carried so far as upon the masculine side ; 1 
nor is the wife often so cut off from her relations as the strict 
consequences of the paternal theory might lead us to expect. 
Her family, as a rule, retains a right of protecting her if she is 
ill-treated ; she will fly to them for succour, and their right to 
guard her is recognized.2_ Lastly, under mother-right the pro- 
perty passes through the woman, if not to the woman. Under 
father-right it goes from father to son. 


10. Social institutions are rarely developed with logical pre- 
cision, and if we ask how far mother-right has actually prevailed 
in the world we find at once that we have to deal with fragments 
which, if conjoined, would make up the coherent type thus 
summarily depicted, but which, in fact, often exist apart, bereft 
of the consequences that seem in logic to belong to them. To 
take only one point, the system of kinship may be matrilineal, 
but marriage may be patrilocal. Then, though the children 
belong by blood to the mother and the mother’s kin, they live 
in the father’s household and among his kindred. Sometimes 
the association with the wife’s people is temporary, the newly 
married couple living with his people for a year or two and 
then setting up for themselves. Sometimes, on the contrary, 
it is the association of the children with their father that is the 
provisional arrangement, and when they grow up they go to 
their mother’s village.° Differences in this matter must affect 
the actual life of the family quite as closely as the theoretic 


1 Thus, a Hindu must not marry within the seventh degree on the 
father’s, or the fifth on the mother’s side (Mayne, Hindu Law, p. 87, 4th 
ed.). Manu makes a deeper distinction: “‘a damsel who is neither a 
Sapinda on the mother’s side nor belongs to the same family on the father’s 
side is recommended to twice-born men” (Manu, iil. 5). Sapindas are 
relations whose common ancestor if a male, is not more than six, if a female 
not more than four degrees, removed from either of them. Manu thus 
insists on complete exogamy to the male line, while forbidding the female 
kin only to certain degrees. 

In Roman law the pretors early began to recognize the full right of 
blood (cognatio) as against the strict agnatio of the patriarchate (Maine, 
Ancient Law, p. 151). 

2 Cf. Vinogradofi, Growth of the Manor, pp. 11, 12 (the Celts); 136 (the 
Germans). 

8’ Thus, in Australia, though the marriage class of the child is often 
determined by that of the mother, both mother and child seem in general 
to belong to the father’s local group. Exceptions are the Maryborough 
and some North Western tribes. 

4 e.g. among the Hottentots, Z. f. V. R., xv. p. 343. 

5 e.g. among the Tsimshian, Thlinkeet, Haida, and Heiltsuk (Boaz, 
B. A., 1888, p. 237). 

M 


162 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


basis of kinship. Thus, in the cases instanced it is impossible 
to say either that ‘“‘mother-right”’ or father-right prevails. 
Both principles are at work. Not only so, but in a number of. 
cases we find both methods of reckoning kinship in use, whether 
because a transition is in progress or because different methods 
of marriage subsist side by side. 

Thus, if we would seek to ascertain the extent to which 
mother-right prevails, we must break up the conception, and 
take certain definite elements singly or in combination. 
Among the simpler societies we find both methods of 
reckoning descent in almost equal numbers, eighty-seven and 
a half matrilineal and eighty-four patrilineal, the matrilineal 
being in the majority among the Hunters and the patri- 
lineal among the Pastoral people. A better indication is 
given by ranking together as “ maternal ’”’ cases in which only 
matrilineal descent is reckoned, and cases in which marriage is 
regularly matrilocal; as “‘ paternal ’’ the opposite pair of cases ; 
and as “‘intermixed ”’ cases in which both forms of descent or 
of marriage obtained, and cases in which matrilineal descent 
is combined with patrilocal marriage or conversely. 

Omitting these last and grouping Hunting, Pastoral and 
Agricultural together, we get the following results—t 


Maternal. . Paternal. 


Hunters S10) 2 EY pone 18 
Pastoral a Fish OS ON ee 10 
Agriculture 2) se ere 47 


In all Indo-Germanic peoples, among Semites and Mongolians, 
in a word, among all the races who have developed the historic 
civilizations, father-right predominates. Thus, broadly, when 
we contrast the civilized with the uncivilized world, we find 
mother-right confined to the latter, and within it we find it 
relatively most frequent in the lower cultures. We find instances 
of it in all parts of the world, and we frequently find among 
“‘ paternal ’’ peoples traces which point to an earlier system of 
mother-right. It would be too much to infer from these that 
the maternal family system is a phase through which all societies 
have passed, but it is a probable conclusion that matrilineal 
kinship, with a greater or less development of the rights and 
customs associated with it, is a form of organization suited 
to the lower phases of culture, while the paternal family 
predominates in. the succeeding grade of civilization. 


1 For further details, cf. Simpler Peoples, p. 152. 


MARRIAGE AND THE POSITION OF WOMEN 163 


There are two conditions to which the rise of the paternal 
family may be referred. The first of these is the recognition of 
paternity, the second is the rise of certain forms of marriage 
involving the appropriation of a woman by her husband. As 
to the first point, paradoxical and almost incredible as it may 
appear to us, there are cases in which primitive men find a diffi- 
culty in understanding that a man is responsible for the birth 
of a child, and attribute it to the action of a spirit or an inanimate 
object. We should not build too much on exceptional cases, 
but it is worth remarking that the transition to father-right is 
in some instances associated with the curious custom of the 
couvade, which, however it is to be understood, is clearly a 
recognition of the relation of the father to the new-born son. 
The essence of the couvade is that the father has to take certain 
precautions at the time of birth. Whatever the precise meaning 
of these precautions—whether they are to protect the father, a 
portion of whose soul is passing into the child, or the child in 
whom the soul is finding a new lodgment—they represent a 
recognition of paternity, and apparently recognition in a crude 
and early form in which it is conceived as a passage of the father’s 
‘soul into the child’s body. Now, among the Melanesians, there 
are islands where mother-right prevails, but the husband has 
begun to assert himself, taking the wife to his father’s house 
or to his own, if he has one ready, where he remains undoubted 
master. Here there is a mild couvade, the father refraining 
from exertion, and from certain foods. But in the South-Eastern 
Solomon group, where father-right is more developed, the 
couvade is also more conspicuous.2 So, again, in quite another 
part of the world, among the South Americans, we find it just 
at the turning point where mother-right passes into father-right. 
Where the position of the father has long been recognized and 
is thoroughly established, the custom disappears. Its flourish- 
ing time is at the period when the one system is beginning to 
give way to the other.’ 

The recognition of paternity, however, is not a necessary 
condition of patrilineal kinship. It is sufficient that a man 

1 This is the theory of the Central Australians (Spencer and Gillen, 
1, 265 and ii. 330). Some Melanesians hold that paternity is due to a 
an” bread-fruit, or something similar (Codrington, J. A. JI., xviii. 

-* Codrington, J. A. I., xviii. 309-311. Cf. Kohler, Z. f. V. &., 1900, 
p. 355, on the couvade in Papuan custom. 

3 Schmidt, Z. f. V. R., 1898, 297. ‘‘ Sie (7. e. the customs connected with 

the couvade) werden sich also am ausgepragtesten gerade wahrend jeno 


Uebergangszeit zeigen wo das eine Princip (2. e. Vater-recht) das Andere 
abzulésen beginnt.”’ 


164 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


should appropriate his wife and her children with her. This 
he clearly does not do so long as she remains in her own family, 
retaining her property as a member of that family and having 
her children in turn reckoned as members of it. But there are 
two processes known to primitive man by which a man can make 
a woman his own property and transfer her to his own family, 
viz. the methods of marriage described as capture or “con- 
sideration.” Professor Tylor justly points out that the practice 
of capture must tend to break up the whole system of mother- 
right. When the woman is carried off from her own clan to her 
husband’s house the physical facts conflict with any custom or 
law regarding her and her children as still belonging to her 
family rather than to his. Hence, out of forty cases of genuine 
or “‘ hostile ’ capture, Professor Tylor finds that six only occur 
in the maternal stage. Of “‘connubial’’ capture he places 
twenty-one instances in the stage of transition from the maternal 
to the paternal system, and twenty-five in the paternal system 
proper. There are no instances under pure mother-right. 
Finally, he enumerates forty-four cases in which the form of 
capture is retained without the reality as part of the wedding 
ceremony. Of these he finds no instances under mother-right, 
but twenty-one in the transitional stage and twenty-three under 
the paternal system.? 

Now though, as we have seen, there is no reason to think 
that capture was ever universal or that it was the original form 
of marriage, it is beyond doubt one very primitive way of com- 
passing that type of marriage which involves ownership of the 
woman, and it is quite intelligible that in a tribe where mother- 
right prevailed those men who by their own bow and spear 
could obtain women from a neighbouring clan should treat 
those women as their own property, and so establish a working 
model of the patriarchate. It is also readily credible that 
the new type should be more popular than the old—at any rate 
among the men—and that they should seek to extend it to cases 
in which the wife belonged to their own clan, and so establish 
universal father-right. But to lay down that this was the 
actual process by which father-right came to prevail would be 
to go far beyond our evidence. There is no proof that all patri- 
archal societies have gone through the stage of marriage by 
capture, and its frequent appearance as a form is not conclusive. 


1 e.g. in some Central Australian tribes, though paternity is not under- 
stood, the son follows the father’s totem. It is sufficient that the husband 
is owner of the mother (Spencer and Gillen, II. 145, 175). 

* Tylor, J. A. J., xvii. 259. 


MARRIAGE AND THE POSITION OF WOMEN 165 


The explanation may be that some form was necessary to assert 
_ definite ownership, and that the natural form of asserting definite 
- ownership was the form of capture. 

The alternative and in reality commoner method of appropriat- 
ing a wife is that of purchase, or quasi-purchase, and the fact of 
purchase is closely associated with the whole position of women 
in cases where the patriarchate is strongly developed. We are 
moving here in a region permeated with ideas of slavery, the 
ownership of one human being by another, permeated also by 
the idea of a family as a unit to which each member belongs 
as a limb. The bride purchased from her own family passes 
out of it and into that of her husband. Where the consequences 
are pressed to their furthest extent her family lose the power of 
protecting her, and the wife is at the mercy of her husband as 
to life and limb. He may dispose of her at pleasure, he may 
sell her, give her away, or lend her; and she has no right of 
redress against him. At best she may escape from him if her 
family return her price and buy her back. Also, there is nothing 
in this order of ideas to prevent the husband buying as many 
women as he wishes. This extreme form must not be taken as 
the normal case. Natural feeling, after all, has its way every- 
where in the world, affection and the sense of kinship survive the 
technical exclusion from the family, and so we more often find 
that by a kind of compromise the wife’s relations retain certain 
powers of protecting her. Her murder would in many cases excite 
the blood feud, and if she runs away from her husband, and can 
satisfy her relations that she had good cause in his ill-treatment, 
they will in many instances stand by her and give her protec- 
tion.? Still, her position, even in such cases, is rather that of a 
protected dependent than of a free woman. Slavery is still 
slavery though the position of the slave may be mitigated by 


1 It must not be assumed that marriage by purchase always implies 
father-right. Under mother-right a man may pay a bride price for the 
usufruct of a woman (e. g. among the Papuas, Kohler, Z. f. V. &., 1900, 
pp. 347, 348). But it is easy to see that out-and-out purchase goes natur- 
ally with, and may be said logically to necessitate a thoroughgoing paternal 
system (see above, p. 154, and below, p. 168). 

2 Post (i. 171) instances former customs among Parthians and Arme- 
nians, the Gypsies, Tscherkessen, Maravis of South Africa, and ancient 
Germans, and quotes Cesar on the Gauls: “ Viriin uxores sicuti in liberos 
vite necisque habent potestatem.”” Among some South American Indians 
the father can lend, sell, or exchange the wife (Schmidt, loc. cit., p. 298). 
The right of the husband to kill the wife taken in adultery is general—Post, 
(i. 172) says “‘ ginzlich universell,’’ but this is an overstatement. 

3 See above, p. 162. Among the Somali and in the Gaboon the husband 
who kills his wife must pay a fine to her family (Post, Afrik. Jurisp., 
p- 62). This, I suppose, is a composition for blood vengeance. So, too, 


166 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


law, and such mitigation is in reality no rare occurrence even 
for the actual slave at the level of civilization which we are 
. considering .+ \ 
/ The appropriation of the wife consolidates the family and 
/tends to the integration of the clan, but at the cost of a more 
or less complete subordination of the wife. Hence the position 
of the woman seems, if anything, to change for the worse as 
social organization advances. This deterioration, however, is 
\perhaps less severe than appears at first sight. 


among the Kaffirs (2b., p. 401). The husband has to pay the blood price 
to the wife’s family if she dies in giving birth to a child; a fortiori we may 
suppose that if he deliberately killed her, the same penalty would be im- 
posed. Among the Ainu, Batchelor (Zhe Ainu of Japan, p. 138) notes 
a change. Formerly the head of a family had absolute powers to divorce, 
disinherit or punish. Now little can be done without consulting neigh- 
bours. Among the Australians the wife was sometimes protected by her 
relations. Thus in N.-W. Central Queensland, if her husband killed her, 
he had to give up a sister to her relations, which may or may not have 
acted as a deterrent. But in addition the woman had always her “ tribal ”’ 
brothers to protect her (Roth, op. cit. 141). Among the Kurnai there 
were cases in which the relatives would seek to avenge a wife whom her 
husband had killed (Fison and Howitt, K. and K., p. 206). In New 
South Wales, on the other hand, Fraser found that the wife was the 
property of the husband, who might kill her without challenge from 
social or tribal laws (op. cit., p. 27). Among the Mandingos the wife is 
protected by the judge (Post, Afrik. Jurisp., p. 402). Among the Yoruba 
by her family (Ellis, op. cit., 187). Among the Malays, in the “‘djudjur”’ 
marriage the wife passes by purchase into the husband’s family, yet the 
wife’s parents can interfere to protect her in case of cruel treatment 
(Waitz, v. 144.) According to Dr. Westermarck (‘‘ Position of Women 
in Early Civilization,’’ Sociological Papers, p. 155), “‘ there are peoples 
among whom the husband’s authority is almost nil, although ‘he has 
had to pay for his wife.’’? But no instances are given, and I imagine 
them to be rare. In Simpler Societies we have noted eighty-two cases in 
which the husband has the right of chastisement and twenty-nine in which 
the wife is protected either by her kindred or the law, but in eight of these 
the protection only qualifies an admitted right of chastisement, and it is 
very possible that with further information we should find the same thing 
to be true in several of the remaining instances. The figures, however, 
are too small to admit of confident generalization. An interesting trace 
of the feeling that it is the duty of a wife’s relations to avenge her is found 
in the Alcestis, vv. 731-733, where Admetus’ father threatens him with 
the vengeance of Alcestis’ brother, though Alcestis has chosen voluntarily 
to die on Admetus’ behali— 


dixas Te Sdcels color KNdeoTats ert. 
H 7'%p 'Axacros ovKér’ eo” év avdpday, 
ei un © ddEAP AS alua Timwphoerat. 


Naturally, however, the right of protection by her relations is more effective 
when the wife is still regarded as a member of their family (Post, i. 173), 
1 For instances, see Post, i. 171-177, 


MARRIAGE AND THE POSITION OF WOMEN 167 


11. The Position of Women in Harly Society. 

Favourable as the position of woman under mother-right 
jappears on the surface, the truth is that it is no bar whatever 
to complete legal subjection. Among the Caribs, where descent 
goes through the female only, the women were nevertheless 
in an inferior position. The husband alone had the right of 
divorce, and he could exercise it at will, the only effect of mother- 
right being that in case of divorce the wife would retain the 
children. Among the North American Indians generally, not- 
withstanding the tendency to mother-right, the position of 
women is, on the whole, admitted to be low.1 In Melanesia, 
where there is strict mother-right, the mother is in no way head 
of the family. The family house is the father’s, the garden is 
his, the rule and government are his.2_ In Oceania generally, 
where mother-right is common, the two sexes are in large measure 
separated in their lives through the complex mass of taboos 
which prohibit their intercourse.* The head of the maternal 
family may have the same despotic power as the patriarch— 
thus, among the Barea and Kunama, he has the power of life 
and death; among the Bangala, the Kimbunda, and on the 
Loango coast the right of selling any member of the family; 
and in general, under the maternal as under the paternal system, 
the head is a male.* 

Apart from the general tendency to overlook the masculine 
headship of the maternal family, and so confuse mother-right 
and matriarchy, mistaken views have arisen from the identifica- 
tion of marriage by service with the subordination of the husband 
to the wife. The man who cannot buy a wife becomes a servant 
to her family, but not to her. Jacob did not serve Rachel, but 
Laban, and when the term of service was complete both Leah 


1 See Waitz, iii. 101, 382; Catlin, N. A. Indians, i. 23 and 226. Ratzel 
puts it that the position of the women is not in all cases one of oppression 
(ii. 128). 

? Codrington, J. A. J., xviii. 309. Dr. Westermarck, who, on the whole, 
takes a favourable view of the position of women among savages, declines 
to attribute any influence in this direction to mother-right (Sociological 
Papers, p. 157; Moral Ideas, 655-657). Herein he is opposed to Steinmetz, 
and to Ratzel (see, e.g. Ratzel, The History of Mankind, ii. 334). The 
argument that (e. g. among the Australians) the position of women is not 
sensibly affected by the system of descent is not very forcible, since the 
importance of the family is so small, as compared with that of the local 
group and its divisions, that the mode of reckoning descent naturally 
counts for little. 

3 In some instances, however, the position of women is, or has been, 
favourable in Oceania, e. g. in Micronesia, and in New Zealand (Ratzel, i. 
273-274, and Waitz, iii. 101). 

* Post, Grundriss, i. 134-136. Post notes that there are exceptions. 


168 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


and Rachel remark that they have now passed out of their 
father’s family. They identify themselves with Jacob, and 
Rachel steals Laban’s household gods on his behalf. At the 
same time, marriage by service does fairly illustrate some_of 
the conditions which modify the relation of husband and wife, 
and may even affect the question whether mother- or father- 
right is to prevail. The man serves because he has not the 
property wherewith to buy him a wife, and so we not infre- 
quently find that the two kinds of marriage subsist side by side. 
Thus, among some Californian tribes, purchase is the rule, but if 
a man can only pay half the bride price he enters the wife’s house 
in a servile position.1 Similarly, among the Micronesians of 
Mariana the husband must serve if he has not wealth enough to 
support the wife. The best instance may be drawn from the 
Malay Archipelago, where the two opposed types of marriage 
are found fully developed with special names. In one, Ambil 
anak, the husband is purchased by the wife’s family; he enters 
it, as a rule, in a dependent position, the children all belong to 
the mother’s family, and the wife has the right of divorce. In 
the other form, Djudjur, the husband or the husband’s family 
has to purchase the wife ; she becomes his property, the children 
are his, and he has the right of divorce. Her parents only retain 
a certain right of intervention in case of cruel treatment.2 In 
such cases, at least, it is clear that the relations of husband and 
wife are determined not by any prevalent custom or opinion 
prescribing what such relations ought to be, but by the actual 
success or failure of the man in finding means whereby to appro- 
priate a woman to himself. Thus the difference between the 


1 Kohler, Z. f. V. &., 1897, p. 383. 

* Waitz, v. i. 144 ff. Cf. Marsden, History of Sumatra, p. 220, etc., 
cited in Spencer’s Descriptive Sociology. 

3 We may note in this connection that among civilized peoples which 
have completely developed the patriarchal system, and perhaps even 
passed beyond its extreme phases, there is a tendency to the subjugation 
of the husband, in cases where women are allowed control of their own 
property, if the wife is the wealthy one. JI am not speaking from the point 
of view of the humorist or the novelist, but of the lawyer. Thus, few 
peoples have pushed the right of the father to a more extreme point than 
the Japanese in the Far East, or the ancient Romans in the west. Yet 
among the Romans, when women acquired by the Lex Julia complete 
control over their dowry, the result was that the husband frequently 
passed into practical subjugation to a rich wife. In Japan it is astonishing 
to find the recrudescence of the primitive custom of the husband coming to 
live with the wife, and taking her name in the case where the eldest 
daughter inherits an estate, or where the bride’s father supplies the house. | 
From instances like these, drawn from cases where the patriarchate had 
its most extreme development, we can understand the full strength of the 
economic factor in determining marital relations, and we may draw the 


MARRIAGE AND THE POSITION OF WOMEN 169 


maternal and paternal systems does not turn on divergencies of 
_ principle as to the rights of women, nor does the superior position 

of the wife’s family necessarily imply any similar superiority 
in the wife herself. No doubt under mother-right the woman 
derives some advantages from her position, such as the retention 
of her children in case of divorce, but the cases in which it has 
given her real equality or superiority prove, on examination, 
to be very rare. Among the Nairs, who are sometimes quoted 
in this connection, and who, as has been mentioned, combine 
polygamy and polyandry, the woman chooses her husband and 
brings him to her house. Possessions pass from mother to 
daughter. The woman may divorce her husband, or rather any 
of her husbands, at pleasure. Often a brother and sister set up 
house together, the tie between them being held closer than 
that between husband and wife, and if in such a case the wife 
goes to live with a husband she will be subject to the sister. 
It follows also that the child is attached to the uncle rather 
than the father. In such an organization the family, as we 
understand it, is, of course, completely broken up, and there is 
no doubt that the position of the woman makes her in a way 
the centre of the whole organization. There is equally no doubt 
that in this case she acquires from this position a considerable 
authority. But we are also told that, although she inherits the 
property, her brother or maternal uncle administers it, and, 
again, it is administered rather on behalf of the whole group of 
kinsfolk—that is to say, as collective property—than as belonging 
to any individual owner, so that, after all, we are not very far 
removed from the normal state of things under mother-right, 
where the woman is subject to her brothers instead of to her 
husband. 

Somewhat similar cases may be cited from among the North 
American Indians. Here the women had occasionally a certain 
measure of political importance; for example, they might be 
represented by a spokesman, either male or female, at the men’s 
council, and they sometimes originated warlike expeditions 
with the object of replacing, by a raid and the capture of a 
prisoner, the loss of a warrior of the clan. To them, also, as we 
shall see later on, was referred in many cases the fate of the 
prisoners taken. They decided whether prisoners should be 
tortured or adopted, and, moreover, took a special part, with a 





inference that where in the uncivilized world we find the husband passing 
into the wife’s family, even in an inferior position, it does not follow that 
any favourable inference is to be drawn as to the prevalence of an ethical 
conception of women’s rights, 


170 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


‘peculiar zest, in the execution of the tortures when a decision 
was taken in that direction. 
Among the Iroquois, where we have some of the most detailed 


accounts, we are told that the women occupied a dominant — 


position in the Long House where the joint family lived. 


“Usually the female portion ruled the house, and were doubt- 


less clannish enough about it. Stores were in common, and 
woe to the luckless husband or lover who was too shiftless to 
do his share of the providing. No matter how many children 
or whatever goods he might have in the house, he might at any 


time be ordered to take up his blanket and budge. ... The 
house would be too hot for him, and unless saved by the inter- 
cession of some aunt or grandmother, he must retreat to his 


own clan, or, as was often done, go and start a matrimonial 
alliance in some other.’?!_ The women, says Morgan, were the 
great power in the clans. They could “ knock off the horns ” of 
a chief, and of certain chiefs they had the nomination.? Yet 


even among the Iroquois we do not find that the position of 


women was altogether good. On the contrary, they did all the 
drudgery of house and field. They were socially separate from 
the man, and the conquered Delaware were named women as a 
term of reproach, and compelled to forego arms as a mark of 
contempt.? Of the North American Indians generally, Waitz* 
makes a remark which goes to the root of the matter, that 
though property passed by the women they seem to have had 
little or none of their own. There remain a few scattered cases 
in which the wife—not merely the wife’s family—is said to 
enjoy superiority or even authority. Among the Kocchs of 
Bengal it is stated by Dalton that the husband goes to live in 
the wife’s clan, and that his property passes to her daughters 
only; and not only this, but he has to obey his wife, and what is, 
perhaps, more extreme, her mother as well. Among some of 
the forest nomads in Asia the position of women is good, e.g. 
among the Veddas, women seem to be equal with men in all 


1 From a letter by the Rev. A. Wright, a missionary among the Senecas, 
written in 1873, and given in Morgan’s Houses and Houselife of the American 


Aborigines, p. 65. It is worth noting that Mr. Wright appears to be — 


describing a past state rather than that which he actually saw. 

4 In all the economic grades we find a few instances in which women 
could take a part in government, either being admitted to councils or being 
able to act as chiefs. In one case, the Wyandot, the women elected and 


formed the gentile council, which chose a man as chief (Powell, Wyandot 


Government, R. B. E., vol. i. p. 61). 
* Schoolcraft-Drake, i. 277, 388. Morgan, League of the Iroquois, 323, 
4 Waitz, iii. 129. 
® Dalton, p. 91. Letourneau, La Femme, p. 175, 


MARRIAGE AND THE POSITION OF WOMEN 171 


respects (Seligmann, p. 8), and we find a few scattered cases in 
. all the economic grades of the lower cultures in which the woman 
is said to be on an equal footing with the man. Other cases 
in which a higher position is attributed to the wife either 
depend on her superior social or economic position or on the 
failure of the husband to pay her price.1_ They do not indicate 
‘that the position of the woman is, as such, equal or superior to 
that of the man. ; 
A handful of exceptions such as these, however interesting as 
_disproving sweeping generalizations, do not alter the fact that 
in the great majority of uncivilized peoples the position of 
woman is in greater or less degree inferior to that of man in 
point of personal rights.2 Apart from a sufficiently frequent 


1 Among upwards of 500 peoples of whom we have obtained some 
information as to marriage and the position of women, we have entered 
seventeen (probable cases reckoned as a half) in which the wife’s position 
is clearly made out to be equal to that of the husband. In one or two 
rare cases the law of divorce favours the wife. For instance, among the 
Khonds of Orissa she may leave her husband on repaying her price, but 
may only be divorced for adultery or misconduct. (Dr. Westermarck 
states that constancy is not required from the wife, and that the hus- 
band may be punished for adultery. Sociol. Papers, p. 152.) The 
husband may not strike the wife taken in adultery—a very exceptional rule 
(Reclus, p. 281). These liberties appear to be connected with a scarcity 
of wives, and with the relics of polyandry (Reclus, 7b.). Post, A. J., 
400, considers that the position of the wife among the Sarae is equal to 
that of the husband, and even superior among the Beni Amer and the 
Galla. But among the last-named he adds that if the husband has once 
brought home the trophies of a departed enemy, he becomes absolute 
master. According to Hahn (quoted by Westermarck, op. cit., p. 154), 
the Khoikhoi (Hottentot) wife is mistress within the house, but according 
to Kohler (Z. f. V. R., 1902, pt. iii. 344, 355—speaking of the Hottentots 
generally), though the wife has a fairly independent position, the husband 
has the right to chastise her in moderation. 

2 Dr. Westermarck, who objects to the term “‘ subjection ”’ as a general 
description of the position of women in the lower races, writes: ‘‘ Among 
many of them the married woman, although in the power of the husband, 
is known to enjoy a remarkable degree of independence, to be treated by 
him with great consideration, and to exercise no small influence upon him. 

In several cases she is even stated to be his equal, and in a few his superior ”’ 
(Soc. Papers, p. 151). Admitting this to be the case, we shall clearly be 
right in persisting that in the great majority of cases women’s legal position 
is inferior. It may be added that considerate treatment is a totally 
different thing from equality of rights. In his new work on The Origin and 
Development of the Moral Ideas, Dr. Westermarck gives a long list of cases in 
which the wife’s position is more or less favoured. But in comparatively 
few of them is equality of rights asserted, and in still fewer superiority. 
Even where equal rights are mentioned, the statements, with two or three 
exceptions, lack precision. Dr. Westermarck himself says: ‘‘ All these 
statements certainly do not imply that the husband has no recognized 
power over his wife, but they prove that his power is by no means unlimited. 
It is true that many of our authorities speak rather of liberties that the 
woman takes herself than of privileges granted her by custom ; but, as we have 


172 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


inferiority in her right to property or to the mere protection of 

life and limb, apart from the fact that the drudgery of life so” 
often falls on her while the men hunt or fight,’ the prevalence: 
of the capture, purchase and exchange of wives testifies strongly 

in this direction. The common facility of divorce, even where | 
the conditions are equal to the two parties, tells against the 
woman, who is the more interested of the two in the perma-_ 
nence of the tie. And very often the conditions are not equal, 
but favourable to the man. The general permission of poly- 

gamy points in the same direction. Lastly, the woman’s person 
is not, strictly speaking, her own property, but that of her 
husband or guardian, and it is in this sense in many cases that 
chastity and respect for women are understood in the savage 
and barbaric world. This peculiarity makes itself felt in many 
directions. In the first place, wife lending is a not uncommon 


seen before, customary rights are always more or less influenced by habitual 
practice’ (p. 646, the italics are mine). The distinction here admitted 
cuts deeper than Dr. Westermarck seems to admit. In a relationship so 
personal and subtle as that between men and women, de facto influence 
and power may develop to the highest pitch, without in the least affecting 
the recognized rights or status of the sex. A favourite of the harem may 
sway an empire and yet remain a slave. The frequent statement of 
travellers that the wife rules the household, or that the husband does 
nothing without consulting her, might have been made of this country in 
the days when the legal position of the wife was most abject. The power 
to influence and recognized ethical equality are not only different, but have 
no necessary tendency to pass into one another. 

1 The extent to which women fill the place of slaves in the rudest societies 
has perhaps been exaggerated by some writers. Dr. Westermarck (Sociol. 
Papers, p. 150) points out that for the men to fight while the women 
toil is a natural division of labour in a world where fighting is a frequent 
necessity. But this, though it explains, hardly alters the fact that an 
occupation recognized as inferior falls to the women (cf. Westermarck, 
Moral Ideas, pp. 633-637). There are many variations, and it would be 
easy to multiply quotations on either side, but on the whole it seems clear 
that the more toilsome and least esteemed work tends to fall on the women. 
See the general statements in Ratzel, as to Oceania, vol. i. p. 273; the 
Malay Region, 2b., p. 441; North America, ii. 129; the Arctic races, p. 
225; the Negroes, p. 334; Kaffirs, pp. 432, 433; and the Mongols, iii. 341. — 
The position in the two first-named regions is the most favourable, particu- 
larly among the more developed peoples. In the Simpler Peoples (p. 170) 
we have tabled eighty-six cases in which the harder work falls to the 
women, and twenty-seven in which it may be regarded as fairly appor- 
tioned. They were pretty evenly distributed among the various economic 
grades. The evidence, naturally, is often difficult to weigh, and many 
peoples have been left unentered for this reason; e.g. among the Karaya 
peoples, Ehrenreich (op. cit., p. 27) says that certain forms of labour fall 
on the woman, but that she is no beast of burden and the man also has 
his duties. Here we can make no entry. Similarly when im Thurn 
(op. ctt., p. 215) says that in British Guiana work is pretty equal, but women. 
really do the more continuous drudgery, we do not think the statement 
decisive enough for entry under either head, 


Na cg 


MARRIAGE AND THE POSITION OF WOMEN 173 


‘custom among savages. ‘The husband who would kill or mutilate 
the wife whom he discovered in clandestine intercourse with a 
lover will also lend her as a matter of courtesy to a guest.) In 
the one case she infringes his right of property, in the other 
case it is as his property that she is acting. She is not, in our 
modern phrase, a person with the full rights of self-respect and 
respect from others attaching to personality. Secondly, where 
the obligations of marriage are binding the rules for the un- 
married are often very lax. One exception to this laxity is 
constituted by the system of child betrothal, whereby the 
-unwedded girl is already the husband’s property,®? and another 
by the demand for virginity in the bride which, under marriage 
by purchase, it is accordingly the interest of her guardian to 
secure. Thirdly, the claim to fidelity is usually one-sided. 


, 1 Numerous instances are given by Starcke (p. 122) and Westermarck 

(pp. 73, 74). The custom is pretty general among the North American 

Indians (Waitz, ili. 111. He excepts only the Sioux and the Chippeway). 
Cf. Schoolcraft, v. 684. Post (Afrik. Jurisp., i. 471, 472) gives numer- 
ous instances in Africa. Waitz (v. ii. 105) attributes the practice to the 
Micronesians generally. We found forty-one instances in our authorities, 
twenty-seven from hunting peoples. 

2 In the Torres Straits any irregular intercourse was called “stealing a 
woman,” and there seems to have been no word for fornication or adultery 
apart from (puru) theft (Cambridge Expedition, 275). 

3 Where the young girls are guarded, precautions are sometimes pushed 
to disagreeable lengths, as in New Britain, where, between eight and ten, 
they are put into cages and kept there till they are married. 

4 Post, i. 21-23. When the husband expects virginity at the time of 
marriage, unchastity may become a breach of the proprietary rights of 
the guardian. Hence it is often punishable, especially if it results in 
pregnancy. Thus, among the Takue, the Marea and the Beni Amer, the 
seducer who makes an unmarried girl pregnant excites the blood feud, 
and among the Bogos the full blood price is demanded in such a case 
(Post, Afrik. Jurisp., i. 61 and 70). Among the Wanyamwesi the lover 
must marry the pregnant girl under penalty of a fine (Post, A. J., 1. 458), 
and in Unyoro she is taken to his house, and, by a characteristic piece 
of primitive reasoning, he must pay for her if she dies, while if she lives 
she returns to her father unless the lover pays the bride price. (For 
other instances in Africa, see Post, 2b., 459, ii. 70, and cf. Letourneau, 

La Femme, p. 48.) 

In the previous editions I took the view that prenuptial unchastity is 
normally disregarded in the simpler cultures, and that its enforcement 
depended almost exclusively on child betrothal or on marriage by pur- 
chase. But a more extended study of the evidence has convinced me that 
this is an error. It need hardly be said that the evidence in this matter 
is often very difficult to assess. Relations may be winked at while an open 
scandal is subject for censure or punishment. We should not treat these 
as cases of condonation, e.g. where, as among the Bhuiyars (Crooke, ii. 
87), we are told that unmarried girls are free, but that a lover, if detected, 
is fined and forced to marry, we regard this as a prohibition; on the other 
hand, where relations are generally tolerated, and, in case of pregnancy, 
marriage or compensation to the relatives is at the option of the man, 
we think the case falls on the other side of the line (see Risley on the 


174 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


While any offence on the wife’s part exposes her to punishment, | 
and while an outraged husband may lawfully avenge himself on 
the man who has trespassed on his property, the unfaithfulness ) 





Lepchas, vol. ii. p. 8 and Wehrli, J. A. #., xvi. 28, on some of the Singpho 
peoples). Bearing these difficulties in mind, the following results must be 
taken for what they are worth. 

(1) We have found fifty-six and a half cases (probable ones reckoned at 
a half) of the condemnation and sixty-seven and a half of the condonation 
of prenuptial unchastity. This, considering the uncertainty of the evidence, 
is a balance on the unfavourable side on which no stress can be laid. But 
among the hunting peoples, particularly in Australia, there are several 
cases in which, though there is no mention of prenuptial relations as a 
general rule, the marriage procedure involves the submission of the girl 
to a number of men—e.g. among the Wotjobaluk, all the young men 
of the totem would have the right (Howitt, p. 246). In this connection, 
2. €. aS bearing on the regard or disregard for the woman’s person, these 
cases should be reckoned with those in which prenuptial relations are 
condoned, and this weights the scale more heavily among the Lower 
Hunters. Bringing these cases into relation with instances of wife-lending 
as of cognate character, it appears that in this respect the Hunting tribes 
stand materially below the Agricultural, while these, again, are clearly 
below the Pastoral. But there is no more detailed correlation with the 
economic advance, for, in fact, the lowest Agricultural stage comes out 
materially better than the two higher stages. 

(2) To test the effect of marriage by ‘‘ consideration,” and in particular 
by purchase, on prenuptial chastity, we compared the proportion of cases 
in which it was condemned or condoned (a) in cases where consideration 
is known to be given with all cases, (6) in cases of purchase with all 
cases. The results show no advantage to marriage by consideration, 
and but a small one to marriage by purchase (cf. Simpler Peoples, 
p- 168). Our figures cannot yield certainty, because we are not fully 
informed of the basis of marriage in all cases, but, so far as they go, 
they favour the independent origin of prenuptial chastity. The attitude 
of the family is probably tightened up by the custom of purchase, but 
no more. 

In some instances, the unchastity of an unmarried woman is regarded 
as bringing a curse or some misfortune on the family or the tribe. Thus. 
the Aleuts fear that the whale would punish them if their wives were 
unfaithful in their absence, or if their sisters were unchaste before marriage 
(Reclus, p. 52). Similarly in Loango, the unchastity of a girl is held to 
bring a curse on the country (Westermarck, p. 61), and a similar idea 
seems to underlie the punishment: of a pregnant maiden on the Gold 
Coast, where she is chased by the women to the sea, covered with dirt 
and ducked, after which she receives charms from the fetishman (Post, 
A. J., i. 460). Apparently this is not so much by way of punishment 
as to avert evil. As to the man, he, of course, may be punished, often 
with death, for the infringement of the rights of the family: We may 
find the germ of a different conception in the belief that the unchastity 
of a man under certain conditions will cause misfortune. Thus the Aleuts 
above quoted believe that the whale will punish them, not only if 
their wives are unfaithful, but if they are unfaithful, while on a fishing 
expedition, to their wives. It is a widely-diffused belief among the 
North American Indians that unchastity on the war path would bring 
defeat, and hence captive women are generally spared. For the rare cases 
in which a husband incurs penalties to his wife for unfaithfulness see next 
note. 





MARRIAGE AND THE POSITION OF WOMEN 175 
| inally, it is often open to fathers to devote their daughters 
to prostitution. This is not infrequently a religious duty, and 


fr the husband to the wife is but seldom regarded as an offence. 


in many cases there are recurring religious festivals of which 
‘promiscuous intercourse is a feature.? 


12. All the world over certain forces, ethical, political, economic 
and perhaps religious, act from either side upon the relations of 
men and women. On the whole, apart from a sufficiently strong 
development of the ethical factors, those which fight for the 
man, as physically the stronger, have the upper hand. But 
when there are always forces tending the other way, favourable 
circumstances will occur here and there to give them peculiar 


1 Authorities give one instance to the contrary among African peoples, 
viz. in Great Bassam. Here the husband pays a fine to the wife if un- 
faithful to her while she is with the prince (Post, Afrik. Jurisp., ii. 72). 

Among the Hottentots the husband as well as the wife may be flogged 
for adultery, and except for ill-treatment there is no divorce without the 
consent of the council. But these observations refer to Christianized 
tribes (Kohler, Das Recht der Hotientotten, Z. f. V. R., 1902, pp. 344 and 
354). 

Among the Mariana the husband could kill an adulteress, but if he on 
his side were unfaithful, he would be set upon and would be glad to escape 
with a whole skin (Waitz, v., ii. 106). 

The Sioux and Santal (Dakota) women are said to beat their husbands 
for unfaithfulness (Howard, i. 239). 

According to Dr. Westermarck, among the Shans of Burmah the wife 
may divorce the husband for drinking or other misconduct, retaining 
the common property (Westermarck, Sociol. Papers, p. 154). But Col. 
Woodthorpe (J. A. J., xxvi. 21) states that the Shans of the Upper 
Mekong follow the law of Manu as to divorce, 7. e. the wife has no powers 
of divorce at all. In W. Victoria, as mentioned above (Howard, 1. 229), 
a wife may get a slight punishment inflicted on an unfaithful husband, 
and in some Queensland tribes the women take advantage of the initiation 
ceremonies to punish men who have ill-treated them (Westermarck, 
Sociol. Papers, p. 148). The case of the Khonds has been mentioned above, 
p. 171, note 1. 

As mentioned above, Powers states (p. 22) that among the Karoks of 
California cohabitation even with a female slave is considered disgraceful. 
Two or three more similar instances are found among the North American 
Indians. 

We could prolong the above list if we were to add cases in which bringing 
a second wife or a concubine into the house is a ground of divorce. Broadly 
speaking, however, in the savage world, under mother-right or father- 
right, the husband is master of the wife’s person. Apart from the injury 
to the wife, adultery has a more public aspect as a frequent source of 
vengeance. Hence it is not infrequently a subject of public punishment. 
We have noted forty-eight such cases, the proportion increasing in the 
higher Agricultural stages with the general development of public justice 
(Simpler Peoples, p. 166). 

2 For instance in Africa, see Post (Afrik. Juris., p. 465). In several 
Australian tribes the women are common at the corroboree, except to their 
fathers, brothers or sons by blood (Spencer and Gillen, p. 97). 


176 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


strength. For example, the circumstances attending marriage 
by service, especially when we compare it with marriage by pur- 
chase or capture, have shown us how much the relations of hus- 


band and wife are determined by what, in the modern world, we © 


should call the economic factor. The savage woman’s price— 
if by price we mean the difficulty of appropriating her—may 
be high or low. Where it is always possible to organize a raid 
and carry her off it is decidedly low, and she becomes the captor’s 
property. Where this is not countenanced, it is possible to 
buy her from her guardian, and then presumably her price, 
like that of other things, is a matter of supply and demand. 
The actual number of girls born and the practice as to infanticide 
must affect their value, and we can understand that better 
treatment of a wife becomes necessary to the husband who 
wishes to retain her. In other cases the economic value of 
the woman may be high—for example, where agriculture is 
becoming important and is still regarded as women’s work. 
In yet other cases women are the repositories of magical lore, 


and men fear them. These and doubtless other disturbing © 


causes considerably modify the status, nominal or real, of 
women in the uncivilized world, but the fluctuations which 
they cause are fluctuations about a centre of gravity which is 
sufficiently low. 

In the Simpler Peoples we sought to assess the position of 
women as objectively as possible by the method of reckoning a 
point for each custom that would tell in their favour, and, on 
the other side, a point for each unfavourable feature. For this 
purpose we take what we suppose to correspond to the judgment 
of an average civilized community. This judgment is by no 
means final, and in that sense the whole method is subjective. 
But as an answer to the question how far does the treatment 
of women in the lower economic grades correspond or contrast 
with that of modern civilization, it yields an objective relation 
and is the only method which we could devise yielding any 
_ definite answer. From this point of view monogamy is regarded 
_as favourable to the woman and polygamy as unfavourable. 
That is not always the view of women themselves in polygamous 
communities, but it is the view of civilized woman, which is the 


1 Hence, probably, the favourable position often enjoyed by women in 
polyandrous communities. To us polyandry seems necessarily degrading 
to a woman. To the women of the polyandrous tribe it means that they 
are sought after, and therefore prized. 

* This important suggestion is due to Dr. Westermarck (Soc. Papers, p. 
159), who is also inclined to lay-stress on the economic factor. (On this 
point cf. Ratzel, ii. 130.) 


MARRIAGE AND THE POSITION OF WOMEN 177 


point here in question. Divorce we only reckoned when at the 
will of the husband, other cases being of ambiguous value. The 
husband’s right of chastisement counted as a negative point, 
and the protection of the wife as positive, but we gave it only 
half value, as it may co-exist with considerable power of marital 
chastisement. Other points were the division of work and 
general allegation of equality or inequality, and the admission 
of women to government.! Cases were counted good which 
yielded a net positive mark, indifferent if they gave a zero, and 
bad if a negative. The results showed no striking or progressive 
differences between the grades, but indicated that in the Agri- 
cultural societies as a whole the position of women was slightly 
better, and in the Pastoral a little worse, than among the Hunters,, 
but throughout the negative marks heavily preponderate, as’ 
the appended table shows— 


Position of Women. 


CASES. 
Good. Indifferent. Bad. 
memtadieetar ho) 2b 22 6 131 
( ihe eth: 0 cea Me: 2 1 3 
hy agricultural . .  . |. 65 26 244 
4 Pale Sec ot el OT 30 410 
} 
or i; percentages— 7 
etiunversar., .) wy 4 4 82 
mepeasvordes, |)... 10 2°5 87°5 
mecouiiisal: °°. . |. 19 8 73 


\ 
The only type of culture forming an exception to the rule is 
that of the forest tribes of Asia and Africa. Their case shows 
that the very lowest culture is compatible with a favourable posi- 
tion for women, but in view of the relations subsisting in very 
low cultural grades in North and South America, as well as in 
Australia, this exception cannot be taken as evidence for any 
general equality of women in the beginnings of human society, 
nor, therefore, for any general decline as an accompaniment of 
the first advances of society. It is only in the pastoral stage, 
with the fuller development of the patriarchate, that we find 
signs of a more complete subjection of the wife. 


1 For the full statement of the method, see Simpler Peoples, p. 148 seq. 
N 


178 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


Tosumup. An institution of the nature of marriage is appar- 
ently universal. It is improbable that custom has anywhere left 
the relations of the sexes wholly unregulated, and its regulations 
include the appropriation of individual men and women to each 
other. But in early society the prohibitions or restrictions of 
choice to certain categories are of more moment and more strictly 
enforced than the claims of the individual husband or wife. In 
the majority of cases the union is easily broken, polygamy is in 
most instances allowed, polyandry in a few, licence on occasion 
is not infrequent, and prenuptial relations are often disregarded. 
All these are marks of an incomplete development of family 
life; and in the “‘ maternal” family the method of counting 
kinship tends to separate the interests of the father from those 
of his household. The patriarchal family is more firmly knit, 
but provides no adequate status for the wife and mother. The 
position of woman varies, but in the majority of cases is one of 
dependence. She is generally given in marriage by her relations, 
in three cases out of four for some sort of consideration, which in 
numerous instances amounts to a true purchase, and is on the 
whole subject to male rule. On this point the “ maternal ” 
system does not materially alter her position. In all these 
respects, however, there are at each grade of development 
interesting exceptions. Monogamy occurs in all the grades 
except the higher Pastoral, and in some of the lowest the tie is 
virtually indissoluble, but there is no reason to regard this as 
the primitive form of the institution. At the same time the 
practice of polygamy as distinct from its admissibility increases 
with the economic advance. So too does the custom of pur- 
chase. Mother-right also is commoner at the lower than at the 
higher levels, but there is no clear evidence of any stage at which 
itisuniversal. In other respects the conditions affecting marriage, 
the family life, and the status of woman are roughly constant 
throughout the economic gradations. In each there are instances 
in which as judged by modern standards the position of woman 
is relatively satisfactory, but in each these are a minority. 
Unkindness and ill-treatment are by no means the rule. On 
the other hand, neither romantic sentiment nor the ethical 
claims of personality play any important part. Early society 
achieves with difficulty the consolidation of the family life; and 
the patriarchal basis on which this is finally effected, confirms, 
if it does not seriously accentuate, the dependent position of 
woman. 


CHAPTER V 
WOMAN AND MARRIAGE UNDER CIVILIZATION 


1. IT is with the Patriarchal type of Family organization, it 
would seem, that most of the civilized races have started their 


_ career in history. The stage of Mother-right is clearly left be- 


hind when their history begins. Traces of it remain, like the 
right of the Mother’s Brother in the German law, but they are 
mere traces which would be unintelligible if we had not a mass 
of customs among other peoples by which to interpret them. 
Whether we look at the ancient laws and customs of India, 
Persia, Greece or Rome, of the early Celtic and German tribes or 
the ancient Slavs, or turn to the Semitic and Mongolian civiliza- 
tions and trace back the Family through Islam to the Arabia 
of Mohammed’s time, through the Old Testament to the days 
of the Patriarchs, through Babylonian civilization to the 
Code of Hammurabi, through Chinese literature to the ancient 
classical books, we find that where civilization is beginning the 
Family is in some form or other already organized under the rule 
of the Father The type of marriage law, of family structure, 
and for the most part the attitude to woman appropriate to the 
Patriarchal stage underlie the social history of civilization and 
are deeply imbedded in its structure. ) The strongly knit family 
life} the close personal relations of father, mother and child have 


sformed the nucleus of the stronger and greater social growths. 
“Over a large part of the civilized world the extension of these 


relations by the family cult and theworship of ancestors has 


* proved to be a social bond of marvellous strength and endurance. 
7 Yet this unity may be purchased dearly by the loss of independ- 


ence on the part of the individual members of the family, and 
we have seen how far this is often carried in the barbaric world. 


We have now to see how civilization, starting, in the great 


majority of cases, with this type of family, has dealt with the 


social and ethical problems involved. 


In the early civilization of Asia, the position of women, and 
particularly of married women, was not worse, but, on the whole, 
better than one would expect on the analogy of later times and 


1 The Egyptian family is perhaps an exception (see below, p. 187). 
cae 


180 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


of contemporary civilizations. In ancient Babylon, in the time 
of Hammurabi, t.e. probably between 2150 and 1950 B.c., 
marriage was arranged with the parents, without reference to the 
wishes of the bride,! by a form of purchase. It was, however, a 
modified form approaching more nearly to the exchange of gifts 
which we find in many primitive races. A sum was given, it 
appears from the code, to the wife’s father as well as to the bride 
herself, but this payment? was not universal, and on the other 
side of the account the father made over to his daughter on her 
matriage a dowry which remained her own property in the sense 
that it was returned to her in the case of divorce or on the death 
of her husband, that it passed to her children, and, failing 
them, to her father. Thus the method of marriage appears as a 
quasi-commercial transaction, and the decision thereon belongs 
to the parents of the parties. Similar commercial considerations 
dominate the law of divorce, the leading points of which may be 
given in the words of Hammurabi’s code. 


** 137. If a man has set his face to put away his concubine who 
has borne him children, or his wife who has granted him children, 
to that woman he shall return her her marriage portion and shall 
give her the usufruct of field, garden, and goods, and she shall 
bring up her children. From the time that her children are 
grown up, from whatever is given to her children they shall give 
her a share like that of one son, and the husband of her choice 
shall marry her. 


“138. If a man has put away his bride who has not borne him 
children, he shall give her money as much as the bride price, and 
shall pay her the marriage portion which she brought from her 
father’s house, and shall put her away. 


“139. If there was no bride price, he shall give her one mina of 
silver for a divorce. 


“140. If he is a poor man, he shall give her one-third of a mina 
of silver.” ® 


1 Meissner, Beitrage zum altbabylonischen Privatrecht, 13. 

2 The case of marriage without a bride price is contemplated in Ham- 
murabi, section 139 (Kohler, 118)—that is to say, if bride price is the right | 
translation, and if it is not rather the sum which, in the regular contract 
forms, the husband agrees to give the wife in case of divorce. 

5 The dowry might exceed the bride price (section 164). On the other 
hand, it remained in a sense in the wife’s family, as, if children failed, her 
father regained it on repaying the bride price (section 163). 

“ See sections 163-6, 159-161. 

5 I quote Dr. Johns’ translation, but, following Kohler, have twice 
substituted bride price for “‘dowry.” It is clearly intended that the 
unoffending wife shall have not only her dowry, which is really her own 
property or that of her famity (section 162), but either the bride price, 
which represents, so to say, the worth of her own person, or, what I cannot 
help suspecting to be the meaning, the amount which at the time of the 


WOMAN AND MARRIAGE UNDER CIVILIZATION 18] 


On the other hand, the woman who “has set her face to go 
out and has acted the fool, has wasted her house, has belittled 
her husband,” may either be divorced without compensation or 
retained in the house as slave of a new wife. The wife may also 
claim a divorce (or separation) 1 ‘‘if she has been economical and 
has no vice, and her husband has gone out and greatly belittled 
her,” but she acts at some risk, for if on investigation it turns 
out that she had been uneconomical or a goer about, “that 
woman one shall throw her into the ‘waters.”’? Thus the wife 
has certain pecuniary guarantees against arbitrary divorce, while 
if ill-treated she may leave her husband, but her position as his 
subject is marked by the manner in which infidelity is treated. 
The law provides that both parties should be put to death unless 
the king pardons his servant or the “‘owner”’ his wife.2 The 
lordship of the husband is seen also in his power to dispose of 
his wife as well as her children for debt.* 

Polygamy appears, not in the rich luxuriance of later Asiatic 
civilization, but in a restricted form. A man might marry a 
second wife if a “‘ sickness has seized ”’ his first wife, but the first 
is not to be put away.® Apparently this is the only case in 
which two fully equal wives are contemplated by the code, 
but it was also possible for a man to take a secondary wife or 
concubine, who was to be subordinate to the chief wife. This 
was a common practice when the wife was childless, but was 
apparently legal even when she had children.® 


marriage the husband contracted to give her in the event of a divorce. 
In the contracts of the period the sum is specified. In one case it is a 
mina, in another ten shekels. The wife also states explicitly that if she 
repudiates her husband she shall be drowned, strangled or sold, as the case 
may be. 

FP Mothing is said of her being allowed to marry again. She is to go 
to her father’s house. Observe above that when a divorced woman has 
children it seems to be implied that she will, at any rate, remain unmarried 
till they are grown up. 

2? The translations differ here. I follow Dr. Johns (Hammurabi, 
sections 141, 142, 143). 

3 Hammurabi, section 129. On the other hand, she is allowed to purge 
herself by oath from an unproved accusation; if it is made by her hus- 

band, “she shall swear by God and return to her house ’’; if it is made 
by some one else, she shall plunge into the holy river (131, 132). 

‘4 The period of debt slavery was, however, limited to three years 
(Hammurabi, 117). 

5 Hammurabi, 148. 

6 The provisions of the code are not perfectly clear. The relevant 
sections run as follows: 144. ‘‘ If a man has espoused a woman, and that 
woman has given a maid to her husband and has brought up children, that 
man has set his face to take a concubine, one shall not countenance that 

“man, he shall not take a concubine. 145. If a man has espoused a woman 
and she has not granted him children and he has set his face to take a 


182 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


To sum up, the early Babylonian marriage law contemplates 
marriage by purchase or exchange of gifts with a restricted 
polygamy and considerable authority and privileges for the 
husband, moderated by certain provisions for the protection and 
maintenance of the wife. But in relation to other persons the 
wife is a much more free agent than in many civilized countries 
at the present, or at any rate in recent times. Shecould already 
conduct business and in certain cases dispose of property, and, 
at any rate in later Babylonian times, she appears as possessed 
of full legal personality, carrying on processes of law and appear- 
ing as a qualified witness. In this later period, moreover—that 


concubine, that man shall take a concubine, he shall cause her to enter 
into his house. ‘That concubine he shall not put on an equality with his 
wife.”? (I have followed Dr. Johns’ translation, but substituted ‘‘ woman ” 
for ‘“‘ votary ” in accordance with the views of other translators.) It is 
not clear from this, as it stands, whether a man could compel his wife to 
give him a concubine, in case the wife had children, but elsewhere the case 
of a man having children by both wife and concubine is clearly contem- 
plated, and in the contracts there are cases of a man marrying two wives, 
of whom one is to be subject to the other. Thus Arad-Samas takes Iltani, 
the sister of Taramka, as his wife. He promises to care for her well-being, 
and to carry her chair to the temple of Marduk; he is already married to 
Taramka, but Taramka is placed by the contract in an inferior position 
to Iltani. ‘All children,’ the contract reads, “‘as many as there are, 
and as many as shall be born, are Iltani’s.” If Taramka says to Iltani, 
*“You are not my sister,’’ something terrible happens, as to the nature 
of which a hiatus in the inscription leaves us in ignorance. If either wife 
says to Arad-Samas, “‘ You are not my husband,” she is to be branded 
and sold for money; if they both do it (presumably if they conspire to 
do so), they are to be thrown into the river. If Arad-Samas repudiates 
either of them, he is to pay a mina of silver (Meissner, 7b., p. 71). In 
this contract, essentially the same law as that of Hammurabi is seen in 
active operation, and it is clear that a certain form of polygamy or con- 
cubinage is contemplated, although there are children in existence by the 
first wife. Apparently the object of the code is to maintain the supremacy 
of the chief wife, while imposing on her, if childless, the duty of granting 
children to her husband. The concubine should be provided by her. If 
she failed to give him one, the man might take one, but must still treat 
his wife as mistress of the home. There is no prohibition of concubinage 
merely on the ground that the legitimate wife has children of her own. 
Further, it is only the regular concubinage with a fixed status, determined 
by contract, which is thus limited. There is nothing said to limit inter- 
course with a female slave, whose children might be adopted at will by the 
father, and thus share in the inheritance with the legitimate children 
(Hammurabi, 170, 171). On the whole, we gather (1) that, in case of 
sickness, there might be two regular wives; (2) there might be, in case 
of childlessness, and perhaps in other cases also, a regular concubine, 
subordinate to the wife; (3) a slave concubine unprotected by contract, 
whose children might or might not be recognized and inherit. 

1 Kohler and Peiser, Aus dem Babylonischen Rechtsleben, iii. 8, etc. 
The marriage law had also improved in the wife’s favour. Contracts of 
marriage by purchase are very rare, though one exists of the thirteenth 
year of Nebuchadrezzar, in which the wife is bought for a slave for 
13 gold minas (7b., vol. i. p. 8). 


WOMAN AND MARRIAGE UNDER CIVILIZATION 183 


of the last centuries of the independent Babylonian civilization— 
it appears from the contracts that a woman could protect herself 
against the advent of a second wife by pecuniary penalties in 
the marriage contract.1. On the other hand, her marriage still 
appears to be at the disposal of her male relations, her brothers, 
for instance, when the father was dead. Indeed, even the son 
required the father’s consent to his marriage. To this extent 
the patriarchal power had endured .2 


2. In ancient Egypt a good deal of obscurity surrounds the 
position of women. We have to reconstruct it partly from 
marriage contracts which perhaps do not show us all the con- 
ditions of the bargain, partly from incidents in stories, partly 
from passages in the moralists, partly from the descriptions of 
Greek travellers. We have no precise and certain information as 
to the structure of the family, on which everything turns ; and we 
are dealing with a period of four thousand years or more, in the 
course of which there is time, even in the slow-moving East, for 
many thingstochange. In fact, our fullest information relates to 
the very latest period of independent Egyptian history, and to 
the time of the subjection to Persians, Greeks and Romans. 
In this period Greek observers, as we know from Herodotus and 
from a well-known passage in Sophocles, were struck by the 
independence of Egyptian women, and were possibly led by 
contrast to exaggerate it.2 But it is clear that from the Old 
Kingdom onwards women, married or not, had full right of pro- 
perty with testamentary powers, and could go to law. With 
regard to their position in.marriage our most definite informa- 
tion comes from the contracts. These are all late, being mostly 

1 The husband promises if he takes another wife to give her a mina 
and send herhome. This seems to have been a common protection against 
polygamy. The wife stillengages to be put to death, if unfaithful (Kohler 
and Peiser, i. 7, 8. Cf. Victor Marx, Die Stellung der Frauen in Baby- 
ionien: Beitrage zur Assyriologie, bd. 4, hft.i. p. 5 seq.). 

2 Kohler and Peiser, i. 9, and ii. 7. The right of the father is limited 
in Hammurabi. He might only disinherit a son for a serious crime, and 
then only for a second offence, and with the approval of a judge (168, 169). 
In other words, the property was the family’s and the father had only 
limited rights over it. 

8 This is clearly true of the statement of Diodorus that the marriage 
contract specifically enforced obedience on the part of the husband to the 
wife (Diod. i. 27): mapa tots idiérais Kupiever Thy yuvaina Tavdpos, ev TH THs 
mMpoikds ouyypadt mpotomodocyovytwy TaY yauolyTwv a&mayTa medapxnoery TH 
yanounevn. This does not accord with the preserved examples. See below. 

4 Griffith, Catalogue of the John Rylands Papyri, iii. 28. Gardiner, 
‘* Reyptian Ethics ” (Hnc. Brit., p. 481). The lady Neb-sent conveys land to 
her children by will under the 3rd Dynasty (Breasted, Ancient Records of 
Egypt, i. 79) and the king’s confidante Hetephites receives a legacy of land 
in the 4th Dynasty (2b., 90). 


~ 184 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


of the Persian and Ptolemaic period, while the earliest dates from 
the reign of Psammetichus II. (26th Dynasty), near the close of 
Egyptian independence. This contract speaks of “ compensa- 
tion ’’ to the woman which seems to comprise two sums. One 
of these may be given by her father in lieu of her share of the 
inheritance, and the other by the bridegroom as “‘ morgengabe.”’ 
Whether this is so or not, the bridegroom proceeds to undertake 
that if he leaves the woman “‘ who is mine own ... whether 
desiring to leave her from dislike (?%) or desiring another woman 
than her, apart from the great crime that is found in woman, 
I will give to her”’ the two sums mentioned above, a share of 
the joint earnings during marriage, and to her children their 
share of the paternal and maternal property.1 Clearly a sum is 
appropriated for the wife’s security. Part of this may be her 
dowry? and part a nuptial gift. In any case this sum remains 
in the husband’s hands, but is to go to the wife if he divorces her. 
She has her own inherited property and her children’s right of 
inheritance both to her and their father is secured. She may, 
however, be divorced without penalty for adultery. Polygamy 
seems to be excluded by the terms of the contract. Records of 
divorce exist from the Persian period: ‘I have abandoned thee 
as wife. . . Make for thyself a husband in any place to which 
thou shalt go,’ and in one contract of that reign we find the 
woman stipulating for the right of divorce under money penalty— 
nothing said of the “ great crime that is found” in man# It 
seems clear that in this period the position of the wife depended 
on the bargain. This might, in fact, be varied by a post-nuptial 
contract.° In point of fact these contracts secured the wife by 
a money penalty against arbitrary divorce, and her children 
in their inheritance.6 We must infer that apart from such a 
settlement the position of the woman would be very weak, 
and this accords with the view taken by good authorities that 
among the poorer people loose connexions probably took the place 
of marriage in great degree.® 


1 Griffith, Papyrt, iii. 115. 

* This would seem to be the case in a contract of the time of Darius, 
where the man says, “‘ Thou hast given me three pieces of silver.’’ In case 
of divorce he is to return these plus a third of their earnings. 

8 Griffith, p. 117. 

* The Ptolemaic contracts allow divorce at will of either party, and 
enumerate the bridal property which the wife is to take with her in that 
event. The woman’s position would seem to be advanced materially. 

° Thus a contract of the twenty-second year of Amasis replaces ‘‘ that 
AGT es of wife which I made for thee” in the fifteenth year (Griffith, 
p. 3 - 

§ Gardiner, Enc. Ethics, p. 482. 


‘WOMAN AND MARRIAGE UNDER CIVILIZATION 185 


_ The contracts clearly bar polygamy, and we must assume that 
it was not the custom in the propertied middle class of their 
‘period. Apart from contract it is probable that it was, or had 
‘been allowed, though rare.1 Pharaoh certainly has a large harem 
in which there is one chief wife, the “‘ great spouse,’’ who accom- 
panies the king in his public acts and particularly in his religious 
worship, who is always a princess of the royal blood, and prob- 
ably a sister of the king, who has her own household and her 
own servants, and might on the king’s death obtain practically 
royal authority as regent. Under her there are secondary 
wives taking rank according to their birth, and being probably 
more or less secluded, and beneath them again are a troop of 
concubines and foreign slaves. The court of Pharaoh was 
imitated by the feudal chief of every nome, who also had his 
harem, “where the legitimate wife—often a princess of solar 
rank—played the role of Queen surrounded by concubines, 
dancers and slaves.”’ How far polygamy may have extended 
beyond the great nobles we do not know, but if it existed earlier 
the evidence of the contracts enables us to infer that it was 
dying out in later times. The attitude to women must have 
improved since the days of the Old Kingdom when Pharaoh 
boasts of having carried off the wives of other men, and alleges 
these exploits as proof of his truly royal nature.2 On the other 
hand, the position of the slave girl is indicated in the self-eulogy 
of a Theban high priest: “I knew not the handmaid of his 
(my father’s) house. I did not curse his brother, etc.” It is 
filial piety which is the merit here. Prenuptial relations were, 
in fact, lightly regarded,? and this fact, combined with slavery, 
implies concubinage regularized or other. Brother and sister 
marriage was not rare.* 

On the relations of husband and wife the moralists of the 
Middle and New Kingdom throw some light. They very pro- 
perly enjoin kind treatment of the wife upon the husband. To 
this effect run the precepts of Ptah-Hotep: “If thou art suc- 
cessful and hast furnished thy house and lovest the wife of thy 
bosom, then fill her stomach, and clothe her back. The medicine 


1 Gardiner, Enc. Ethics, p. 481. 

2 Maspero, Recueil de Travaux, vol. iv; Pyramide de roi Ounas, p. 76. 

3 Gardiner, loc. cit. 481, 482. In the “‘ Negative Confession ”’ (see below, 
Part II. chap. ii.) adultery is repudiated, and impurity while serving 
the god or in a sacred place. It does not on balance seem probable that 
fornication, as such, figures in the list of sins (Griffith, World’s Literature, 
p. 5337; Gardiner, loc. cit.; Max Miller, Liebespoesie der alten Afgypter, 
p. 7. On the other side, Budge, Book of the Dead, ii. p. 361). 

4 Gardiner, loc. cit. 


186 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


for her body is oil. Make glad her heart during the time that 
thou hast. She is a field profitable to its owner.” + These are 
most proper sentiments, blended, as they are, with that simple 
worldly wisdom and gentle appeal to self-interest which charac- 
terize the utterances of the excellent Ptah-Hotep, first of all the 
race of platitudinarians; but excellent as the sentiment is, it does 
not imply the subjection of the husband to the wife, but rather 
the contrary.2, The maxims of Ani are a little more detailed : 
“Do not treat rudely a woman in her house when you know her 
perfectly; do not say to her, ‘ Where is that? bring it to us,’ 
when she has set it perfectly in its place which your eye sees, and 
when you are silent you know her qualities. It is a joy that 
your hand should be with her. The man who is firm of heart 
is quickly master in his house.’ ? All this is in the approved 
Oriental style, and so also is Ani’s recommendation to the wife : ° 
“What does one speak of day by day? Let the professions 
speak of their duties, the wife of her husband, and every man 
about his business.”’ 4 
Honour to the mother, however, is strongly insisted on, 


“Thou shalt never forget thy mother, and what she has done 
for thee, that she bore thee, and nurtured thee in all ways. Wert 
thou to forget her then she might blame thee, lifting up her arms 
unto God, and He would hearken unto her complaint. For she 
carried thee long beneath her heart as a heavy burden, and after 


1 Flinders Petrie, p. 132. F. L. Griffith, The World’s Literature, p. 5335. 

* There is a little more point in a further maxim of Ptah-Hotep: “If 
thou makest a woman ashamed, wanton of heart, whom her fellow- 
townspeople know to be under two laws (explained by Mr. Griffith as 
meaning in an ambiguous position), be kind to her a season; send her not 
away, let her have food to eat. ‘The wantonness of her heart appreciateth 
guidance ” (Griffith, World’s Literature, p. 5337). Apparently this is a 
recommendation, couched, it must be admitted, in mild terms, to a 
man who has seduced a woman to treat her with consideration. There 
is clearly no question of any obligation. 

3 The Boulak Papyrus, in Amélineau, La Morale Egyptienne, p. 188. 
Brugsch translates the first words: ‘‘ Do not strike your wife.”” With 
the above compare the Ptolemaic precept, ‘“‘ May it not happen to thee to 
maltreat thy wife whose strength is less than thine, but may she find in 
thee a protector ’’ (Flinders Petrie, p. 133). 

4 Maxims of Ani, § 30. Amélineau, La Morale Egyptienne, 113. As 
early as the 6th Dynasty an obedient priest’s widow gets a legacy “‘ because 
she was so greatly honoured in my heart; she said nothing to oppose my 
heart”? (Breasted, i. 155). It should be added that the husband could 
apparently put the unfaithful wife to death. In the story of the “ Two 
Brothers’ it is narrated without comment, and rather as a matter of 
course, that the husband slew his wife and cast her to the dogs (Griffith, 
World’s Literature, 5257). According to Diodorus, in cases of adultery 
the paraniour was punished with 1000 blows, the wife by having her nose 
cut off (I. 78. 4). 


“WOMAN AND MARRIAGE UNDER CIVILIZATION 187 


thy months were accomplished she bore thee. Three long years 
she carried thee upon her shoulder and gave thee her breast to thy 
mouth. She nurtured thee nor knew offence for thy uncleanness. 
_And when thou didst enter school and wast instructed in the 
writings, daily she stood by the master with bread and beer from , 
the house.” 4 


We do not know the Egyptian system of kinship, but it is 
recognized that the maternal link was the closer 2 and it may be 
that a maternal system lay at the basis of the Egyptian family 
and strengthened the position of women. In later times this 
influence would be reinforced by the important part taken by 
women in industrial and commercial life. In these relations 
and in social intercourse generally it is allowed on all hands that 
_ their position was remarkably free. Little restraint was placed 
on their intercourse with men, they appear on the monuments 
eating and drinking freely—sometimes too freely—in masculine 
company, and they surprised the Greek travellers by going out 
without restraint to work at their trade or manual labour while 
the men often worked at home. Of this position women in 
the commercial and propertied classes availed themselves to 
improve their condition as wives. But the evidence of the 
contracts cuts both ways. If they secured the women who 


1 From the Boulak Papyrus, translated by Griffith, op. czt., p. 5340, 
from the German of Professor Erman. 

2 Gardiner (Admonitions of an Egyptian Sage, p. 43) says that the system 
was transitional. According to Max Miiller (Liebespoesie, p. 6) descent 
was reckoned through the mother, and her brother acted as guardian down 
to a late period. 

3 W. Max Miller, Joc. cit., points out that this freedom would not apply 
to the bondwomen of the peasantry, who were under the arbitrary power of 
royal and priestly officials, and wove for them shut up in a work-house. 
Here, however, we touch the general question of slavery rather than the 
special position of women. It is more to the point that to have refrained 
from pressing a widow remained a matter for boasting, and that education 
in reading and writing was not often extended to girls. It is going too far 
to say with this writer that no ancient or foreign people, except those of 
New Zealand, have given women so high a legal position. The attitude 
to women in Egyptian literature is not particularly respectful. Often she 
is represented as the temptress, for instance in the Boulak Papyrus— 

** Keep thyself from the strange woman who is not known in her city. 
Look not upon her when she cometh and know her not. She is like a 
whirlpool in deep waters, the whirling vortex of which is not known. The 
woman whose husband is afar writeth unto thee daily. When none is 
there to see she standeth up and spreadeth her snare. Sin unto death is 
it to hearken thereto ”’ (Griffith’s tr. following Erman, World’s Literature, 

- 5340). 
z The peters tendency of the passage, which recalls the well-known 
chapter in Proverbs, is plain enough, but whether the warning is principally 
directed against the harlot or the adulteress is not wholly clear. 


188 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


were in a position to obtain them, they illustrate the precarious 
situation of the wife under the ordinary law. Our information 
is broken and incomplete, but taken as it stands and viewed as 
a whole it by no means suggests a real equality of the sexes. 


3. Both in Egypt and Babylonia the position of women was 
in some respects better than our traditional conception of the 
Oriental woman would lead us to expect. In other cases that 
conception accords only too closely with the facts. Each civiliza- 
tion has had its own peculiarities, but they have been variations 
upon one type. In India tradition starts with the heroic age of 
the Vedas, in which the paternal power is already fully developed. 
The father is master and, indeed, owner of the family ; wife, sons, 
daughters and slaves have no property of their own, but are 
rather his property. On his death, his place is taken by the 
eldest son, into whose tutelage the widow passes. The daughter 
might be sold to an intending husband,! and it is not probable 
that her consent was a material condition.2, The widow passed 
to her husband’s brother until a son was born : she did not in this 
age follow her husband to the grave, though the funeral cere- 
mony strongly suggests the previous existence of such a custom.® 
Finally, the Vedas contain distinct traces of polygamy, though 
it was doubtless an exception. Thus Indian family life begins 
with a typical Patriarchate. To this system a religious turn was 
given by the Brahman law. In some respects the Brahmans 
endeavoured to purify the marriage relationship and to provide 
for the protection of the wife. This appears especially in the 
attempt to prohibit marriage by purchase. This form of marriage 
is recognized, but figures along with marriage by capture as one 
of the four blamable kinds, and “‘ no father who knows the law 
must take even the smallest gratuity.for his daughter.” He that 


1 The purchase of brides is mentioned in the Epic Poems. Thus Bhishma 
purchased the daughter of the Prince of Madras for Pandu, with gold and 
precious stones (Duncker, History of Antiquity, vol. iv. pp. 255-266). 
Capture was probably an alternative to purchase (loc. cit.). 

* Muir (Sanscrit Texts, v. 459) quotes a passage from the Vedas which 
suggests that some freedom of choice was exercised by women under 
favourable conditions. ‘‘ Happy is the female that is handsome. She her- 
self loves (or chooses) her friend among the people.”” In the Mahabharata 
the King’s daughters appear to choose their husbands, but this is a pre- 
rogative of Royalty. 

3 When the widow has led her husband to the place of burial, she is 
exhorted to “ elevate herself to the world of life,’ for her marriage is at an 
end (Duncker, op. cit., iv. 511). 

* In one hymn the poet prays that Pishan will protect him and provide 
him with a supply of damsels (Muir, v. 457, 461). 


WOMAN AND MARRIAGE UNDER CIVILIZATION 189 


‘does so is ‘a seller of his offspring.” 1 Purchase is reduced to 
the form of a fee given to the Brahman for the fulfilment of the 
‘sacred law, and this fee is not to be appropriated by the relatives 
themselves. Yet notwithstanding Manu’s discouragement of the 
practice, marriage by purchase persisted in a modified form, the 
final compromise being that the present given by the suitor was 
assigned to the benefit of the bride and became her dowry, pass- 
ing back to her own family on her death. The barbaric form of 
marriage by capture or abduction, which is morally condemned 
by Manu but legally sanctioned for the Kshatriya caste, became 
obsolete, being forbidden in Narada’s code, and the two forms of 
marriage which persist in India to this day are the Brahma, the 
gift of a daughter decked and honoured with jewels to a man 
learned in the Veda whom the father himself invites, and the 
Asura, or purchase in the modified form described.” 

Only in one case, moreover, does Manu recognize the free-will 


1 Manu’s eight forms of marriage and his comments on them are full of 
instruction for the transition from barbaric to civilized marriage laws. 
The gift of a daughter, after decking her, to a man learned in the Veda and 
of good conduct .. . is called the Brahma rite. The gift of a daughter 
who has been decked with ornaments to a priest . . . they call the Daiva 
rite. When (the father) gives away his daughter according to the rule, 
after receiving from the bridegroom, for (the fulfilment of) the sacred law, 
a cow and a bull or two pairs, that is named the Arsha rite. The gift of a 
daughter (by her father) after he has addressed (the couple) with the text, 
«¢ May both of you perform together your duties,” . . . is called . . . the 
Pragépatya rite. When (the bridegroom) receives a maiden, after having 
given as much wealth as he can afford to the kinsmen,and to the bride 
herself, according to his own will, that is called the Asura rite. The 
voluntary union of a maiden and her lover one must know (to be) the Gan- 
dharva rite, which springs from desire, and has sexual intercourse for its 
purpose. The forcible abduction of a maiden from her home, while she 
cries out and weeps, after (her kinsmen) have been slain or wounded and 
(their houses) broken open, is called the Rakshasa rite. When (a man) 
by stealth seduces a girl who is sleeping, intoxicated, or disordered in 
intellect, that is the eighth, the most base and sinful rite of the Pisdkas 
(Manu, iii. 27-34). Of these, the first four are allowed to Brahmans. 
They are all, in effect, religious marriages, the gift in the third, or Arsha, form 
being of a ceremonial character, as it is to be ‘‘for the fulfilment of the 
sacred law,” not a price for the daughter. A variant appears in the code 
of Apastamba (II. vi. 12, 13; Mayne, p. 82), wherein a gift of value was 
made to the bride’s parents, but returned by them. The four blamable 
rites are purchase, capture, voluntary union, and treacherous seduction. 
Of these, the two first, as we have seen, are allowed to the warrior caste. 
The fifth and eighth, the law book of Bauddhayana allows to Vaisyas and 
Sudras, since they “are not particular about their wives” (Baud., I. ii. 
13, 14). These are, in the main, relics of barbarism, yet a higher con- 
ception appears when Bauddhayana remarks that “‘some recommend the 
Gandharva rite (i. e. voluntary union) for all castes, because it is based on 
mutual affection ” (ib.). But this germ of a true marriage by mutual 
consent was not allowed to fructify. 

2 J. D. Mayne, Hindu Law and Usage, pp. 79-85. 


190 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


of the maiden in the matter of her own marriage. If her father 
fails to provide her with a husband within three years of her 
attaining maturity she may marry whom she will.t In all other 
cases her guardian disposes of her hand. The woman who is 
thus passed from the absolute control of her father into the 
absolute control of her husband must honour, obey and merge 
herself in him. ‘“‘ Though destitute of virtue, or seeking pleasure 
(elsewhere), or devoid of good qualities, (yet) a husband must be 
constantly worshipped as a god by a faithful wife.”? “She 
must always be cheerful, clever in (the management of her) 
household affairs, careful in cleaning her utensils, and economical 
in expenditure.’ On his side the husband is commanded to 
show her respect. ‘‘ Women must be honoured and adorned by 
their fathers, brothers, husbands, and brothers-in-law, who desire 
(their own) welfare.’ * He is to be faithful to her, “ being 
constantly satisfied with her alone.’’ Her son is even to respect 
her more than his father. ‘The teacher is ten times more 
venerable than a sub-teacher, the father a hundred times more 
than the teacher, but the mother a thousand times more than 
the father.”’ > “And so Vasishtha says, “‘ A father who has com- 
mitted a crime causing loss of caste must be cut off. But a 
mother does not become an outcast for her son.” ® But though 
respected if virtuous, she is to be chastised if the husband thinks 
her otherwise. The chastisement, however, is strictly limited. 
** A wife, a son, a slave, a pupil, and a younger brother of the full 
blood, who have committed faults, may be beaten with a rope or 
split bamboo, but on the back part of the body (only), never on a 
noble part; he who strikes them otherwise will incur the same 
guilt as a thief.’ Here, as elsewhere, fluctuations of opinion 
show through Manu’s text. In one place we read, “ Day and 
night women must be kept in dependence by the males of their 
families,’ § yet a few sections on the appeal is to women them- 
selves: “‘ Women confined in the house under trustworthy and 
obedient servants are not (well) guarded ; but those who of their 
own accord keep guard over themselves are well guarded.” ® 
But this higher note is seldom struck. The Brahmans are far 
too much impressed with the evil disposition of women,” and the 
husband is recommended to keep his wife well employed about 


1 Manu, ix. 90 ff. 2 Manu, v. 154. 3 Manu, v. 150. 
£ Manu, ili. 55. 5 Manu, ii. 145. 

6 Vasishtha, xii. 47, 48. 7 Manu, viii. 299, 300. 

§ Manu, ix. 2. ° Manu, ix. 12. 


10 When creating them, Manu allotted to women (a love of their) bed, 
(of their) seat and (of) ornament, impure desires, wrath, dishonesty, malice, 
and bad conduct (Manu, ix. 17, and see the whole passage, 13-18). 


WOMAN AND MARRIAGE UNDER CIVILIZATION 191 


_the house keeping things clean and preparing his food, as an 
expedient for guarding her. 

On the strict theory of Manu a wife could have no property. 
In this respect she is placed on one footing with a son and a 
slave The wife could not leave her husband under any circum- 
stances, but he might take other wives and might “‘ supersede ” 
rather than divorce her if she “ drink spirituous liquor, is of bad 
conduct, rebellious, diseased, mischievous or wasteful.’ Further : 
«* A barren wife may be superseded in the eighth year, she whose 
children all die in the tenth, she who bears only daughters 
in the eleventh, but she who is quarrelsome without delay.” 
** But a sick wife who is kind to her husband and virtuous in 
her conduct may be superseded only with her own consent and 
must never be disgraced.’’? There are, indeed, traces in the text 
of Manu, on the one hand, of a custom allowing deserted wives 
as well as widows to marry again, and, on the other, of an 
idealistic attempt to establish indissoluble monogamous marriage. 
But these remain as traces only. What the Brahmans actually 
succeeded in doing was to prevent the re-marriage of women 
even after the death of their husbands, while men obtained the 
right to take as many wives as they pleased, though they might 
not dismiss any existing wives save for one of the faults 
enumerated.? Such having been the position of the wife during 
the husband’s lifetime, after his death she must remain faithful 
to him, “‘ she must not even mention the name of another man 


1 This, however, is not carried out consistently (Manu, ix. 194). 

2 Manu, ix. 80-82. 

3 Manu, always liberal in inconsistencies, is more than usually so on this 
point. The cause, as shown by J. D. Mayne, is clearly mutilation of the 
text in the interest of conflicting views. Thus in ix. 46, 47, we read : 
* Neither by sale nor by repudiation is a wife released from her husband. 
. . . Once is the partition (of the inheritance) made, (once is) a maiden 
given in marriage, etc.’’ From this it is clear that the repudiated wife 
could not re-marry. Further, it seems that the attempt was being made 
to impose monogamy and conjugal fidelity on the husband as well. ‘“ Let 
mutual fidelity continue unto death, this may be considered as the summary 
’ of the highest law for husband and wife” (ix. 101). Connect this with 
v. 168, ‘‘ Having thus, at the funeral, given the sacred fires to his wife who 
dies before him, he may marry again, and again kindle the (fires).”’ This 
seems to imply monogamy with mutual fidelity as the ideal, but in other 
parts a plurality of wives is freely contemplated, and in ix. 77-82, the dis- 
missal of a wife is permitted on several conditions as shown in the text. 
Further, Mayne (Hindu Law and Usage, p. 93) shows conclusively that a 
passage has been omitted before ix. 76, justifying a wife in marrying again 
after desertion for a period of years. Thus we trace (1) a period when 
widows and deserted wives may marry again, (2) an attempt to establish 
monogamy. But the net result of this sacramental conception of marriage, 
impinging on actual law and usage, was, in the Brahmanic codes, the 
greatest liberty for the man, and the most complete bondage for the wife. 





192 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


after her husband has died.’’1 . She is now under the tutelage of 
her son, for a woman is never a free agent. “ By a girl, by 
a young woman, or even by an aged one, nothing must be 
done independently, even in her own house. In childhood, a 
female must be subject to her father, in youth to her husband, 
when her lord is dead to her sons; a woman must never be 
independent.” 2 

The chastity of women was to be preserved by their seclusion, 
and their unfaithfulness punished by their husbands. We have 
seen that in the barbaric world the infringement of chastity is 
regarded mainly as an offence against the woman’s owner. The 
influence of this conception is still apparent in the Brahmanical 
codes, which, in assigning punishments for seduction and adul- 
tery, observe a marked distinction between the cases where the 
woman is properly guarded and those in which she is free from 
proper surveillance. The same conception had another con- 


{ 

1 Manu, v. 157. On the other hand, not only is suttee not mentioned 
by Manu, but the original text appears, as we have seen, to contemplate 
re-marriage (see especially ix. 175, 176). Among the Jats of the Punjab, 
re-marriage is allowed to the deserted wife and to the widow; in Western 
India it is allowed to the lower castes if the husband is impotent, if the 
parties are continually quarrelling, or if, by mutual consent, the husband 
breaks the wife’s neck ornament, or if he deserts her for twelve years 
(J. D. Mayne, op. cit., 94, 95). Polygamy, on the other hand, as to which 
the earlier text of Manu seems to have wavered, remains to this day an 
undoubted right. On the whole, we may say that nowhere has the sub- 
jection of women been more complete than in India, and Mohammedan 
influence, far from improving matters, has only furthered the practice of 
seclusion. 

2 Manu, v. 147, 148. 

3 For a scale of penalties modifiable according as the woman is guarded 
or not, see Manu, viii. 374 ff. 

On the subject of legal punishments and religious penances for different 
forms of immorality, Manu is quite bewildering in his divergencies of 
statement, and the case is made worse if the other Brahmanist law books 
are consulted. Two instances may suffice to illustrate the difficulty of ex- 
tracting a consistent view. In viii. 371, the king is to cause the adulteress 
to be devoured by dogs. But in xi. 177, ‘‘ an exceedingly corrupt wife ” 
is merely to be confined to one apartment and to perform the penance pre- 
scribed for males in the case of adultery. Probably the explanation is that 
the first passage, which speaks of a wife “ proud of the greatness of her 
relatives,’ lays down the penalty for high caste women who love men of 
lower caste. This is explicitly stated in the corresponding passage of 
Gautama’s code (xxiii. 14, 15). But there is nothing in Manu himself to 
clear up the point. Again, in xi. 59, intercourse with unmarried maidens 
is somewhat strangely classed with the deadliest of all sins—violation of 
the Guru’s (teacher’s) bed—but in § 62 it is classed among minor offences 
causing loss of caste. 

I shall not attempt to thread my way through the maze, but will note a 
few salient points— . 

(1) Considering the low position of women, the punishments of immoral- 
ity, where no caste complication is involved, seem moderate. It would 


WOMAN AND MARRIAGE UNDER CIVILIZATION 193 


sequence, paradoxical enough in our eyes. As the husband 
was the proprietor of the wife, he was also the owner of her 
children, whether they were his children after the flesh or not. 
_And as children were a desirable acquisition for the purposes 
both of this world and the next, it was not unusual for a child- 
less husband to compel his wife to bear him a child by another 
man. In the Mahabharata we read that wives who refuse such 
a duty are guilty of sin. It was through a similiar order of ideas 
that if the husband died childless his brother 1 was appointed 
to raise up seed to him. This, of course, was for religious 
purposes only. The son of the appointed lover, on the other 
hand, was the son for this world as well as the next. But with 
the progress of civilization the Niyoga, as this custom was 
called, gradually fell into discredit and made way for a purer 
conception of the relations of husband and wife. It deserves 
mentioning here as one of the most remarkable paradoxes in the 
field of Comparative Ethics that the same teaching which insists 
so strongly on the guarding of women as though the preservation 
of their persons for the benefit of their owners were the sole 
object of their existence, should also say of adultery that ‘‘ men 
who have no marital property in women, but sow their seed in 
the soil of others, benefit the owner of the woman.’ 2 But the 
paradox resolves itself into this, that proprietary right rather 
than personal self-respect and love is deemed the basis of con- 
jugal obligation. Property is more than personality, and it is 
precisely this that is characteristic of Oriental as, on the whole, 
of primitive marriage. 


4. Turning from India to China, we do not find much change 
in the position of the woman. The arrangement of marriage 


seem as though but little responsibility were attached to the woman. Thus 
the maiden who makes advances to a man of high caste is not to be fined, 
only if he is of lower caste is she to be confined to her house (vill. 365). 

(2) A low-caste seducer suffered corporal punishment. One of equal 
caste had to pay the nuptial fee if demanded by the woman’s father. 

_ (3) Adultery and fornication appear as religious offences (xi. 59 seq.). 

(4) The husband’s right to kill an unfaithful wife is substantially recog- 
nized—the penance required being only to give a leathern bag, a bow, a 
goat, or a sheep, according to her caste (Manu, xi. 139). 

1 The Levirate is usually connected with the principle that the widow 
belongs to her husband’s family, and probably this was its historical origin 
in India. But in Manu it rests on religious considerations and is reduced 
to the dimensions necessary for religious purposes. The brother must only 
cohabit with the widow so far as it is necessary for the purpose of raising up 
seed to his brother (Manu, ix. 60), and the whole practice is forbidden in 
the passage 64-68, which contradicts the clauses permitting the Niyoga. 

* Manu, ix. 51. 


.6) 


194 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


is in the hands of the parents, and the son is as much at their 
disposal as the daughter.! 

“Young people,’ says the Editor of the She-King,? ‘ and 
especially young ladies, have nothing to do with the business of 
getting married. Their parents will see to it. They have to 
merely wait for their orders. If they do not do so, but rush to 
marriage on the impulse of their own desires and preferences, 
they transgress the rules of heaven and violate the law of their 
lot.” The marriage is, in fact, arranged by go-betweens who 
form a kind of profession, and as it is now, so was it perhaps 
three thousand years ago in the days of the She-King.? 

The full ceremony of marriage is, as a rule, gone through with 
only one woman; bigamy or the raising of a concubine to the 
rank of wife is punished by ninety blows* (unless in certain 
exceptional cases), but there are secondary wives or concubines 
who owe obedience to the first wife, and it is a point much 
insisted on in the classical books that the head wife should 
show no jealousy of her inferiors.® 


1 Chinese travellers note relics of marriage by capture in the ceremonial 
and point out that the ideograph for slave is compounded of *“* woman ” and 
“hand,” implying that the woman is the type of that which, in the phrase 
of the Koran, “‘ your right hand possesses.’’ Further, to marry a wife is 
written ‘‘ to take a woman,”’ while to marry a man has a different symbol 
(Douglas, Society in China, 202). In this connection note that the imperial . 
editors, writing on the She-King, Part I. Book I. Ode 2, speak of a strict 
taboo on the relation of husband and wife in antiquity. ‘“‘ Anciently 
the rules to be observed between husband and wife required the greatest 
circumspection. They did not speak directly to each other, but employed 
internuncios, thus showing how strictly reserved should be intercourse 
between men and women, and preventing all disrespectful familiarity ”’ 
(Legge, The She-King, Part I. Book I. Ode 2, p. 7 note). 

2 Book IV. Ode 7, Stanza 3, note. 


8 “* How do we proceed in taking a wife ? 
Announcement must first be made to our parents. 
Since such announcement was made, 
Why do you still indulge her desires? .. . 
How do we proceed in taking a wife ? 
Without a go-between it cannot be done. 
She-King, Book VIII. Ode 6, Sts. 3, 4. 


* Fornication is punished with eighty blows, and the pander is liable 
to seventy (Alabaster, Notes and Commentaries on Chinese Criminal Law, 
p- 367). 

5 Writing of the She-King, Dr. Legge says: “ The institution of the 
harem is very prominent, and there the wife appears lovely on her entering 
into it, reigning in it with entire devotion to her husband’s happiness, free 
from all jealousy of the inferior inmates, in the most friendly spirit 
promoting their comfort and setting them an example of frugality and 
industry. It is apparently to these inferior inmates that the concluding 
verse of an Ode expressing the affectionate devotion of a wife, alludes— 


“When your arrows and line have found them, 
I will dress them fitly for you .. . 


WOMAN AND MARRIAGE UNDER CIVILIZATION 195 


The Chinese husband is master in his own household, the 
patria potestas is strongly developed, and the state interferes 
inside the family only in extreme cases, The husband may 
kill his wife if taken in adultery;? he may strike her without 
wounding her,? whereas she receives a hundred blows for 
striking him; + while if, for abuse of his parents, he so punishes 
her as to cause her death, he receives a hundred blows. He 
may sell his wife,> and sometimes does so in times of famine, 
he may divorce her for barrenness, lasciviousness, disregard of 
his parents, talkativeness, thievish propensities, envious and 
suspicious temper, and inveterate infirmity. She, on the other 
hand, has no power of divorcing him,® but at best may arrange 
to part by mutual consent.’ 

The power of the husband does not end with the dissolution 
of marriage; if he makes formal complaint of the commission 
of bigamy by his wife, she is strangled. After the husband’s 
death the widow still owes him a duty. There is no definite 
institution of suttee, but contemporary authorities tell us that 
the suicide of widows is frequent, and in the south often public, 
and turning back to the classical books, we find the widow 
professing life-long chastity and devotion to the memory of 
the departed. Hence it is intelligible that women frequently 








When I know those whose acquaintance you wish, 

I will give them of the ornaments of my girdle. 

When I know those with whom you are cordial, 

I will send to them of the ornaments of my girdle. 

When I know those whom you love, 

I will repay their friendship from the ornaments of my girdle.” 
She-King, Part I. Book VII. Ode 8. 


1 Douglas, 78. <A father who kills his son without cause is subject to a 
light penalty. If he kills him for striking or abusing his parents, he goes 
free (Alabaster, 156). The father may require the courts to order the 
transportation of an unruly son (7ib., 154), and a child may be sold for good 
cause (7b., 157). 

2 But it must be done on the spot. Otherwise he is liable to a mitigated 
penalty (Alabaster, 187, 188). 

3’ But he must exercise judgment in correcting her. ‘‘ If he knocks her 
brains out when told by his mother-in-law to give her a whipping, he will 
_be responsible for the murder ”’ (tb., 189). 

4 Douglas, 81. If the husband kills her for striking him or his parents, 
extenuating circumstances are allowed. For killing the wife without 
cause, the penalty is strangulation subject to revision (Alabaster, 186). 
For killing the husband it is decapitation, a severer punishment because 
it affects the after-life (ib., 192). 

5 By practice, not, unless in exceptional circumstances, by strict law. 
If she commits suicide in consequence, he is liable to three years’ trans- 

portation (Alabaster, 189). 
§ Unless it is for impotence (7b., 182). 7 Douglas, 71. 


8 “ Tt floats about, that boat of cypress wood, 
There in the middle of the Ho, 


196 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


prefer a nunnery or suicide to marriage. And yet the love of 
home and yearning for absent wife and child:is, we are told, 
no infrequent theme of Chinese poetry. Such is the power of 
human feeling to survive all laws and institutions. 

The position of Chinese women has not undergone any funda- 
mental change within the historical period. Perhaps in some 
respects it has deteriorated.1 In particular, the binding of 


With his two tufts of hair falling over his forehead, 
He was my mate, 

And I swear that till death I have will no other. 

O mother, O Heaven, 

Why will you not understand me ? / 


It floats about, that boat of cypress wood, 
There by the side of the Ho, 
With his two tufts of hair falling over his forehead, 
He was my only one, 
And I swear that till death I will not do the evil thing. 
O mother, O Heaven, 
Why will you not understand me ? ”’ 
She-King, Part I. Book IV. Ode 1. 


Cf. Douglas, 216, etc. The sacrifice of wives at the death of the em- 
peror was abolished by Kanghksi 1661-1721 (Douglas, 227). Human 
sacrifice at funerals (chiefly of women) appears intermittently from the 
first recorded case (that of Wu, ruler of Tsin, 677 B.c., when sixty-six 
people were sacrificed) to the present time. It was opposed by the Con- 
fucians. In the eighteenth century suttee was on the increase, and to 
check it the honours conferred on the suttee women revoked, A.D. 1729 
(De Groot, Religious Systems of China, ii. 721-807). De Groot considers it 
incredible that the case of Wu should really have been the first. Possibly 
he was the first of his house to be so “‘ honoured.” 

1 The She-King describes the difference of attitude to the infant son and 
daughter in terms which are exactly reproduced to-day— 


** Sons shall be born to him; 
They will be put to sleep on couches ; 
They will be clothed in robes ; 
They will have sceptres to play with; 
Their cry will be loud. 
They will be (hereafter) resplendent with red knee-covers, 
The (future) king, the princes of the land. 


Daughters shall be born to him; 
They will be put to sleep on the ground ; 
They will be clothed with wrappers ; 
They will have tiles to play with. 
It will be theirs neither to do wrong nor to do good. 
Only about the spirits and the food will they have to think, 
And to cause no sorrow to their parents.” 
She-King, Part II. Book IV. Ode 5, Sts. 8, 9. 


In point of fact the lot of the infant daughter was often much worse. 
The extent of infanticide in China has undoubtedly been exaggerated. 
The killing even of illegitimate children after, though not at birth, is an 
offence, though but lightly -punished (Alabaster, 170). The practice, 
however, is frequent in many districts, and it is the daughter who is 
ordinarily the sufferer. 


WOMAN AND MARRIAGE UNDER CIVILIZATION 197 


feet has grown up within the last thousand years, a mush- 
room growth in the antiquity of China.t The great teachers, 
though personally married to one wife, and having no concu- 
bines, did nothing for the amelioration of the position of women. 
Mencius, indeed, proposed to divorce his wife because he found 
her in a squatting position on the floor of her room, and was 
only restrained by his mother’s advice from doing so. This 
same mother expressed the whole duty of Chinese women when 
she refused to be consulted as to where they should live. She 
said, “It does not belong to a woman to determine anything of 
herself, but she is subject to the rule of the three obediences: 
when young she has to obey her parents, when married her 
husband, and when a widow her son.” 

It only remains to add that where men keep women in so 
much subjection they generally impute to them a double dose 
of original sin, and the She-King, chiming in with the literature 
of the Hebrews and Hindoos, says, “ Disorder does not come 
down from heaven, it is produced by the woman. Those from 
whom come no lessons, no instruction, are women and eunuchs.’’2 


5. The Hebrew marriage law begins when we first come across 
it in the fully-developed patriarchal stage. The analogy of primi- 
tive Arabian tribes suggests an earlier state of mother-right, but 
of this there are in the Old Testament only the merest traces.® 
A man acquires a wife by purchase or by service, from her 
father or her nearest male relative. In either case she passes 
completely out of her father’s family, and belongs to him who 
has paid for her. ‘‘Is there yet any portion or inheritance for 
us in our father’s house? ”’ say Leah and Rachel. “ Are we not 
counted of him strangers? for he hath sold us and hath also 
quite devoured the price paid for us.”’® 

This very neat summary of the theory of marriage by service 
has already been referred to. But the marriage affairs of Jacob 


1 Yet there is an objection to the bamboo as a penalty for women, and 
if subjected to it, they are not stripped as they were in England to the 
beginning of the nineteenth century (Alabaster, op. cit., 107). 

* She-King, Part III. Book III. Ode 10, St. 3. 

3 Itis clear that Sarah was really Abraham’s half-sister, and his marriage 
to his father’s daughter would be in accordance with primitive custom 
under mother-right. 

4 Laban apparently gives away Rebecca, his sister, and both he and her 
mother receive precious things for her. At the same time Rebecca’s own 
wishes clearly are considered. 

5 Gen. xxxi. 14. Mr. Cook, however, suggests that their complaint is 
that Laban has kept that which should have come to them (cf. supra, p. 154, 
note 1). 


198 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


illustrate some further points which we can understand well 
from the Babylonian code. Part of the agreement between him 
_ and Laban is that he shall not “ afflict ’’ Laban’s daughters, and 
- that he shall not “take wives beside my daughters.”1 This 
is quite in the spirit of a Babylonish marriage contract. But 
there is a further point of similarity. Though Jacob took no 
more wives, each of his two wives gave him a handmaid precisely 
as is contemplated in the Code of Hammurabi, and the hand- 
maid’s children were in each case reckoned to the wife. In 
Hammurabi’s language, “ the wife had granted him the children.” 

Polygamy is contemplated in the Law, the only limitation 
being that in the Priestly Code two sisters are not to be married 
at the same time. Concubinage is also contemplated, and so is 
the sale of a daughter for that purpose. The daughter that is 
sold is especially protected in the Book of the Covenant. She ~ 
is not to be set free in the Sabbatical year, but,if she “ please 
not her master who hath espoused her to himself, then shall he 
let her be redeemed; to sell her unto a strange people he shall 
have no power.” -If a girl were espoused to his son she should ~ 
be dealt with “after the manner of daughters,” or if married 
to her master she was protected in case he took another wife. 
‘“‘ Her food, her raiment and her duty in marriage shall he not 
diminish.’”” In the humane code of Deuteronomy protection 
is even extended to the captive bondwoman. She is to be 
allowed a full month for mourning before being married, and 
once married, “if thou have no delight in her then thou shalt 
let her go whither she will, but thou shalt not sell her at all for 
money, thou shalt not deal with her as a chattel because thou 
hast humbled her.” 

While there is no prohibition of polygamy in the Law— 
Deuteronomy merely states that the children of the better-loved 
wife are not to be preferred to the first-born—in practice, as 
among the Egyptians, the custom seems to have died out little 
by little,? and in the Proverbs monogamy seems to be assumed 
throughout. The right of divorce rested entirely with the 
man, and the grounds of it in Deuteronomy are very vaguely 
expressed. ‘‘If she find no favour in his eyes because he hath 
found some unseemely thing in her, he shall write her a bill of 
divorcement.’’ But none of the codes are at pains to define the 
grounds of divorce clearly. They assume it as a right of the 
husband, and their careless expressions have given grounds for 


1 Gen. xxxi. 50. 


* Apparently it was not formally forbidden till the tenth century A.D, 
(Bryce, Studies, ii. 384). 


WOMAN AND MARRIAGE UNDER CIVILIZATION 199 


much difference of interpretation which has affected Christian 
as well as Jewish Law. 

There is no mention in the Law of divorce by the wife, but 
among the later Jews she could claim a divorce if her husband 
were a leper, or afflicted by a polypus, or engaged in a repulsive 
trade.” 

The position of the woman in the family gives her guardian 
certain definite rights and duties as to the disposal of her person. 
Thus Judah, as the head of the family, proposes to burn Tamar, 
his daughter-in-law, for unchastity, but acknowledges in time that 
he was bound to give her as a widow of his son Onan to his 
other son Shelah. The husband’s brother, in fact, had the duty 
of marrying the widow, and, failing the brother, the obligation 
fell on the kindredg Boaz, as Ruth’s kinsman, first offers her 
to a nearer relative, and on his refusal weds her himself. The 
daughter does not inherit landed property if there are sons, 
but failing sons, she becomes the heir, and in that case she 
must marry within the tribe, a recognition of the eminent 
ownership of the tribe over the whole land. 

Such being the position of women, it is not to be expected 
that the attitude expressed to them in literature should be one 
of great respect or admiration. At best their virtues as house- 


1 Of the Jewish Legalists the school of Shammai (first century B.c.), 
pressing the word “‘ nakedness,’’ which is the most literal rendering of the 
term translated ‘‘ unseemly,’ understood it of unchastity; the school of 
Hillel, pressing (in Rabbinical fashion) the word “‘ thing,” and the clause, 
*“if she find no favour in his eyes ”’ (though this, as a matter of fact, is 
qualified by the following words, ‘‘ because he hath found some unseemly 
thing in her ”’), supposed the most trivial causes to be included, declaring, 
for instance, that a wife might be divorced, even if she burnt her husband’s 
food, or if he saw a woman who pleased him better. It may be doubted, 
however, how far the latter opinion was literally acted upon. The grounds 
mentioned in the Mishnah as justifying divorce are, violation of the law of 
Moses, or of the Jewish customs, the former being said to consist in a 
woman’s causing her husband to eat food on which tithe has not been paid ; 
in causing him to offend against the law of Lev. xviii. 19; in not setting 
apart the first of the dough, Num. xv. 20 ff., and in failing to perform any 
vow which she has made; and the latter in appearing in public with 
dishevelled hair, spinning (and exposing her arms) in the streets, and 
conversing indiscriminately with men, to which others added, speaking 
disrespectfully of her husband’s parents in his presence, or brawling in his 
house. The Karaite Jews limited the grounds of divorce more exclusively 
to offences against modesty or good taste, a change of religion, serious 
bodily defects, and repulsive complaints. That the Hebrew word denotes 
something short of actual unchastity may be inferred from the fact that 
for this a different penalty is enacted, viz. death, also the same expres- 
sion is used, not of what is immoral, but only of what is unbecoming. 
It is most natural to understand it of immodest or indecent behaviour 
(summarized from Driver, Deuteronomy, p. 270 note). 

* Driver, p. 271. 


200 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


wives were admitted, but in the famous description of the 
virtuous housewife in the Proverbs there is not a word of a 
union of mind or soul, and there is little indeed to differentiate 
the wife from the cheerful, active, intelligent and, let us add, 
charitable housekeeper. We read that “ she spreadeth out her 
hands to the poor,” and again, “she openeth her mouth with 
wisdom and the law of kindness is on her tongue,” but there 
is no word of the romance of love or of the higher side of the 
conjugal relation.+ 

On the other side of the account woman is regarded as the 
source of evil. ‘‘ Give me any wickedness save the wickedness of 
a woman ”’ is the burden of Ecclesiasticus. A bad woman is the 
temptress and the destroyer throughout the Wisdom literature, 
and it was through woman that sin came into the world, and for 
this reason, that she was to be subject to her husband.” 


6. We have seen that among the primitive Arabs mother-right 
and polyandrous unions prevailed, but in Mohammed’s time the 
women were mere chattels, forming a part of the estate of their 
husband or father and descending to the son. They were held 
in low account, and female infants were frequently put to death. 
“Women are the whips of Satan ”’ is an amiable saying of the 
masculine Arab of this period, having said which it is not sur- 
prising that he should add: “ A man can bear anything but 
the mention of his wives.’”” Mohammed set himself to ameliorate 
the position of women. ‘“ Ye men,” he said, “ ye have rights 
over your wives, and your wives have rights over you.” But he 
was not able to carry his reforms very far according to our ideas. 
He limited the number of legitimate wives to four, but allowed 
an unlimited number of slave concubines; he insisted that the 
woman’s consent to her marriage should be obtained, but the 
consent of her guardian also remained essential. Whether 
the temporary marriage in practice in Mohammed’s time is still 
allowed is debated between the sects.® 

But free divorce Mohammed was compelled to tolerate: “‘ The 
thing which is lawful but is disliked by God is divorce.”’ There 
are, indeed, certain cases in which divorce is compulsory,* but 
even apart from them the husband may divorce his wife without 


1 It is probably another writer in the Book of Proverbs who says that 
** a virtuous woman is a crown to her husband ”’ (Prov. xii. 4). 

2 Mr. Montefiore points out that the appreciation of a good woman is 
higher in the ‘‘ Wisdom of the Son of Sirach ”’ than in the Proverbs, in 
correspondence with the general-advance in her position (Hibbert Lectures, 
1892, p. 491). 

Hughes, Dictionary of Islam, p. 314. 4 Hughes, pp. 87, 88. 


WOMAN AND MARRIAGE UNDER CIVILIZATION 201 


assigning any cause. The wife, however, is protected by the 
dower, or more strictly, the bride price, of which a portion is 
deferred, and which may be claimed by the wife if she is divorced 
without cause.1 Her position is therefore somewhat similar 
to that which the provident Babylonian or Egyptian woman 
secured for herself by the marriage contract. On her side, the 
wife is bound to live with her husband, but if she can prove 
ill-treatment, can obtain a separation from the Kadi. Bad con- 
duct or gross neglect is a good defence to a suit brought by the 
husband for the restitution of conjugal rights.2/ The husband 
has, however, the right of chastisement, and the admonition of 
the prophet, “ Not one of you must whip his wife like whipping 
a slave,’ does not, to European ears, appear to err on the side 
of chivalry.® 

Yet Mohammed made the kind and equitable treatment of 
wives a moral if not a legal duty: “The best of you is he who 
behaves best to his wives.”” The lord of many women must be 
impartial. ‘“‘When a man has two wives and does not treat 
them equally he will come on the day of resurrection with half 
of his body fallen off.’ But if there is to be kindness, it is to 
be such asis due to the weaker vessel: ‘‘ Admonish your wives 
with kindness, ain women were created from the crooked 
bone of the side.”\¢ 

The position of the wife under the Sunni law is thus summed 
up by Mr. Hughes— 


“Her consent to marriage is necessary. She cannot legally 
object to be one of four wives. Nor can she object to an unlimited 
number of handmaids. Sheis entitled to a marriage settlement or 
dower, which must be paid to her in case of divorce or separation. 
She may, however, remit either whole or part of the dower. She 
may reiuse to join her husband until the dower is paid. She 
may be at any time, with or without cause, divorced by her 


1 4b., 91. 2'40., 6735. 

8 The traditions record that the prophet forbade the Moslems to beat 
their wives. Brute force being thus ruled out, natural superiority asserts 
itself, and the faithful come to complain that the women have got the 
upper hand. The prophet consequently revokes the order, and then the 
women complain in their turn. Mohammed is then reduced to moral 
suasion : ‘‘ Those men who beat their wives do not behave well. He is not 
of my way, who teaches a woman to go astray and entices a slave from his 
master ’’ (Hughes, 671). 

4 A wife taken in adultery might be stoned, but four witnesses with a 
fivefold repetition of the oath were required to prove the offence (Koran, 
Part I. chap. iv. 15). Nor is the death-penalty recommended, but rather 
seclusion in the house (loc. cit., and Hughes, p. 11). Fornication is 
strictly forbidden to men. 


202 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


husband. She may seek or claim divorce (khul’) from her 
husband with her husband’s consent. She may be chastised 
by her husband. She cannot give evidence in a court of law 
against her husband. According to the Sunnis, her evidence in 
favour of her husband is not admissible, but the Shi’ahs maintain 
the opposite view. Her husband can demand her seclusion 
from public. Jf she becomes a widow she must observe hidad 
or mourning for the space of four months and ten days. In the 
event of her husband’s death she is entitled to a portion of her 
husband’s estate in addition to her claim of dower, the claim of 
dower taking precedence of all other claims on the estate.” + 


Nor has a woman full legal privileges outside marriage. Her 
evidence is not accepted in cases involving retaliation. Her 
fine is one-half that of a man, and the value of her testimony 
one-half that of a male witness. Yet she may hold public 
positions, she may act as a judge except where retaliation is 
involved, and in some Mohammedan states princesses have ruled. 
She can hold property, retains the usufruct of her property 
during marriage, and takes the property with her in case of 
divorce. She has also a claim to inherit along with her male 
relations, confirmed by the express words of the prophet.? She 
is not to be slain in war, and for apostasy she is not put to death, 
but. imprisoned until she recants. The general attitude of 
the Mohammedan world towards her is too well known to need 
illustration, but two traditional sayings of Mohammed may 
be quoted as illuminating the intellectual chaos to which a 
well-meaning man is reduced when he contemplates that help- 
mate over whom he so complacently assumes superiority and 
dominion. ‘The first is this, ‘“‘I have not left any calamity more. 
detrimental to mankind than-women,” and the second is the 
complementary expression of the master in his other mood, 
“The world and all things in it are valuable, but more valuable 
than all is a virtuous woman.”’ 

With this final contradiction mirrored in the double motive 
for secluding women, (a) as a compliment, implying that they 
are elevated above the ordinary affairs of life; (b) as a pre- 
caution, implying that they are not to be trusted with liberty— 
with this contradiction in theory and in practice, rooted as it is 
in a radically false view of womanhood, we may leave the Oriental | 
world and its efforts to deal with the relations of the sexes. 


7. But the first nation of the West to which we turn was in 
this respect largely orientalized. The Greeks founded Western 


1 Hughes, p. 671. 2 Koran, i. 72; cf. Dareste, pp. 61-63. 


WOMAN AND MARRIAGE UNDER CIVILIZATION 203 


civilization, but their rapid advance in general culture was by 
no means accompanied by a corresponding improvement in the 
position of women. On the contrary, it is in the earliest period 
and among some of the most backward states that the woman 
has most freedom. 

The Homeric woman moves freely among men. Nausicaa 
welcomes Odysseus and brings him to her father’s house. She 
bids him kneel to her mother if he would gain a welcome and 
succour from her father.1 The relation of husband and wife is 
close and tender; Andromache relates how her father’s house 
has been destroyed with all that were in it, “‘ but now, Hector, 
thou art my father and gracious mother, thou art my brother— 
nay, thou art my valiant husband.” 2 

We never hear of more than one legitimate wife. On the 
other hand, the carrying off of women as bond-slaves was habi- 
tual. Briseis was a recognized portion of the spoil, and such 
capture implies concubinage along with legitimate marriage.® 
If the bridegroom could not take the bride in a raid, he bought 
her for a goodly number of cattle, and over his concubines, at 
any rate, he exercised powers of life and death. Odysseus 
compels the faithless handmaidens to carry forth the bodies of 
the suitors and bids Telemachus put them to the sword; but 
Telemachus thinks this too good a death, and strings them up 
to a ship’s cable in the hall, where they hang struggling like 
thrushes in a net. 

The patria potestas persisted in a mild form in the historical 
period.> The father was the religious and legal head of the 
family; he performed the family sacra, and represented wife, 


1 At the same time Arete’s position seems to have been somewhat 
exceptional, for Alcinous honoured her as no other woman in the world 
is honoured of all that nowadays keep house under the hand of their 
lords (Odyssey, VII, Butcher and Lang Tr., p. 105). Was this an explana- 
tion needed by the audience of a later age ? 

2 Iliad, VI. 429, 430. 

$ Yet the wife might resent this. Laertes bought Eurycleia in her 


_ youth for twenty oxen and hon>ured her equally with his wife, ‘‘ but he 


never lay with her, for he shunned the wrath of his lady” (Odyssey, I. 
Tr. Butcher and Lang, p. 15). Deianeira lets Herakles have as many 
concubines as he chooses, but cannot tolerate Iole as a wife in her house 
(Wilamowitz-Mdllendorf, Staa/ und Gesellschaft, p. 34). 

4 Odyssey, XXII. 468. 

5 The right of exposing a caild was limited in Sparta by the meeting of 
the tribesmen (Plutarch, Lycwrgus, 16, cited by Leist). Leist (p. 59) 
thinks the ayxicre?s must be meant. Exposure was forbidden by law only 
in isolated instances and those of the archaic period. Thebes is the most 
noteworthy case. In gene.al if remained a serious factor in Greek life 
(Wilamowitz, p. 35). The legitimacy of the child had to be acknowledged 
by the kindred in order to secure its right of inheritance. The adult son 
was emancipated. 


204 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


children and slaves in the courts.1 Nor were limitations on 
personal liberty and responsibility peculiar to the wife, for here 
again woman was subject to the three obediences to father, 
husband or son, and failing them, to her nearest blood relation. 

The sons in most cases divided the inheritance, the daughters 
having only a right to maintenance and dowry. But what 
property women had remained theirs during marriage, and in 
some states they even had the right of management.? In early 
times the father might sell his daughters, or brothers their 
sisters, when under their guardianship. This right was abolished 
by Solon except in the case of unchastity,? but a father retained 
the right of controlling his daughter and even of disposing of 
her by will,* or of giving his son, while a minor, in adoption to 
another family.6 There could be no legitimate marriage without 
an assignment of the bride by her guardian. The wife passed 
into the husband’s family, and was separated from her own kin 
and their sacra. At Athens she might be divorced on payment 
of the bride price, while on her side she could only obtain a 
divorce by the sanction of the archon.’ At Sparta, where, in 
some respects, e.g. in regard to. property, she had a higher 
position,’ it seems that looser relations prevailed. Brothers 


1 The Athenian woman could follow no suit of a value exceeding a 
medimnos, except through a guardian. The wife had very limited powers 
of alienation without the husband’s consent. ; 

2 Busolt, Handbuch der Klassischen Altertumswissenschaft, 19, 20. 

Here Dorian and Ionian custom stand in contrast. From the preoccupa- 
tion of the Spartiate with military exercises it followed that his wife was 
left in charge of the land, and she might inherit and hold estates as her own. 
The Athenian woman seems only to have received “ movables ”’ as her 
dowry (Wilamowitz, pp. 34, 94). The land in Attica belonged to the 
family. Hence if the daughter inherited she must marry her nearest kin— 
sons of the same father not excluded (Wilamowitz, 33, 34). 

3 é71 5° ovde Ouyarépas TwAciy ob7’ AdeAPaS Sldwaor TAHY dy wh AGBy mapOEevoy avdp) 
ovyyeyernuevny (Plut., Solon, 13, 23, cited by Busolt, loc. cit.). 

4 Letourneau, La Femme, 416. 

5 Busolt, p. 19. According to Leist (p. 62) he had practical, but not 
legal control over the son’s marriage. 

6 At any rate at Athens (Busolt, 210). The ayxore?s (relations to the 
fourth degree on both sides) had to see that the orphan heiress was married, 
and her nearest male relation (after her brothers) had the right of marrying 
her, and correspondingly the duty of so doing or of finding a husband 
for her (Busolt, 20; Leist, 40, 47). 

7 Letourneau, La Femme, 423. At Sparte divorce for sterility seems to 
have been expected at any rate of a king (Hercdt., v. 40). 

8 According to Aristotle two-fifths of th» land of Sparta had come 
into the hands of women by inheritance and bequest in his time, and the 
Spartiate women, having successfully resisted. the attempt of Lycurgus to 
impose on them the same discipline as the men accepted, enjoyed a state of 
liberty which in Aristotle’s view amounted to licence, and was disastrous 
to Sparta (Politics, ii. 1269 B, 1270 A). 


WOMAN AND MARRIAGE UNDER CIVILIZATION 205 


might share a wife in common, and wife-lending was recognized, 
whereas at Athens the punishment of adultery was enforced. 
Monogamy prevailed,? but concubinage was legally recognized, 
provided that the handmaiden did not reside in the same house 
with the legal wife. The concubine’s children might be legiti- 
mated by adoption, and might then enter the phratry, whereby 
they acquired all the privileges of citizenship.® 

But the woman, though under ward, was certainly not regarded 
as a chattel. Probably Aristotle expressed the ordinary Greek 
view accurately enough when he said that a man should rule his 
slaves as a despot, his children as a king, and his wife as a magis- 
trate in a free state. Yet it was a Greek poet who first let women 
speak for themselves and not in terms of male sentiment, and 
a Greek thinker who first frankly argued the case for the free 
admission of women to all the duties and rights of man. Plato’s 
position differs from that of his modern successors in that he 
insists rather on women’s duties than on their rights, more on 
what the state loses by their restriction to the family circle than 
on the loss to their own personality. Further, though he had 
the experience of Sparta to go upon, his own teaching was too 
much associated with polemics against the family and with a 
fanciful ideal of communism to be taken quite seriously. On the 
other hand, Aristotle summed up the whole philosophy of the 
ancient world, of the East, and perhaps the prevailing sentiment 
in modern Europe, when, discussing those who are fit to bear rule 
and order the affairs of men, he says that a slave does not possess 
that power of deliberation (75 BovAevrixdv) which is the basis alike 
of self-government and of the government of others. A child 
possesses it but imperfectly. A woman possesses it, but in her 
it is without authority (d«vpov). After all, the Greeks did little 
to develop it. There appear to have been no regular schools 


1 By the Solonian legislation the husband who concealed his wife’s 
adultery was punished with ariufa. Yet the punishment of the adulterer 
was left in the husband’s hands. If caught flagrante delicto he was abso- 
_ tutely at the husband’s mercy. In any case he could be imprisoned at the 
husband’s pleasure, and was released on payment of a fine (Letourneau, p. 
422). The wife was not killed, but divorced (Leist, p. 300). For an 
instance of wife-lending at Athens, Letourneau cites the case of Kimon 

(Letourneau, p. 415). 

_ 2 Anaxandrides, king of Sparta, declined to divorce his barren wife, 
but consented to take a second. This was regarded as quite un-Spartan 
(Herodt., v. 40). Bigamy was not a punishable offence, but might be a 
ground of divorce. It was actually legalized at Athens after the losses of 
the Sicilian expedition (Zimmern, Greek Commonwealth, p. 334). Super- 
numerary wives in foreign parts are an occasional theme of the New Comedy 
(Wilamowitz, p. 34). 

3 Busolt, op. cit., p. 201. 


206 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


for girls at Athens,! and it was only the courtesan of the higher 
class who was a fit helpmeet mentally for Pericles or capable of 
sustaining a conversation with Socrates.2_ Xenophon’s ideal wife 
is a good housekeeper, like her of the Proverbs. 


8. The modern European marriage law has three roots—Roman 
Law, Primitive Teutonic custom, and the Christian doctrine of 
marriage; but it has been largely remodelled in the modern 
period under rationalizing influences. It cannot be studied 
statically, but has a long, varied and interesting history, of 
which an attempt will be made here to give the briefest possible 
outline. This history starts with the early Roman family, 
organized as it was under the highly-developed potestas of the 
father. All the children are the father’s, and in law he can 
dispose of them at pleasure.? He can chastise them, sell them 
into slavery, and even put them to death (jus vite necisque).* 
Before exercising this supreme power he has, it is true, to con- 
sult the council of relations, but he is not bound by their judg- 
ment. In short, the paternal power is nowhere more strongly 
developed, nor does the position of wife and children anywhere 
approach in law more nearly to that of slaves, owned by the 
paterfamilias, and except as a matter of grace, incapable of. 
owning anything themselves. 

Into the family thus constituted a wife passed on her marriage. 
The marriage might be accomplished by either of two forms, and 
it might also be made valid apparently without any form at all. 
The first form was confarreatio, in which the essential feature 
was the eating by both bride and bridegroom of a cake—an act 
of the kind which we call symbolic, but which to primitive man 
is rather magical, actually efficacious in establishing a unity of 


1 Here the Spartans were more liberal, as they admitted women to the 
gymnasia (Busolt, ii. 158). 

2 Mr. Zimmern, after weighing the arguments of Wilamowitz (Arist. und 
Athens, ii. 100), adheres to the traditional view of the high qualities and 
position of women like Aspasia (op. czt., p. 332). 

3 Exposure, however, if the law attributed by Dionysius (ii. 15, Bruns, 
p. 7) to Romulus is correct, was limited to female infants and required the 
consent of the neighbours—dmacay & appeva yeveay extpeperv, Kar Buyarépwy TAS 
mpwroydvous. No child was to be killed under three years—mAhy ef Tt yévowro 
madtov avamnpov  Tépas evOds ard yovijs. Tatta S ode éxdAvoev (O “PwpyvaAos 
ExT evar TOUS yelvapevous, emideltavras mpdrepov mevTE avopaat Tois eyylora oikovaty, 
etc. 

* Bruns (p- vets quoting Dion. ii. 26. (‘O° Paptros) aracay eSwnev etovalay 
mar pl Kad viov, kal mapa mavTa Thy TOU Blov xpdvov édy TE elpyew édv Te Haart 
youv, édy Te déopioy émt THY KaT aypoy Epyov KaTéxew, edy TE amoKtivydvat 
Mpoaipiirat,—ArAG Kar TwAciv epiice Tov vily TO mar pl, —Kal TOUTO TwvEexXdpnoe Te 
matpl, méexpt tplrns mpdcews ap viod xpnuaticacba. ~"pere dé rhy rplrny mpaow 
axnAAakro Tov TaTpés. 


| 


Ii 
| 


WOMAN AND MARRIAGE UNDER CIVILIZATION 207 


the man and woman. The second form was called coemptio, 
_ and was of the nature of a formal sale, almost certainly, in the 
_ light of what we know of other peoples, preserving the memory 


of a real purchase of the wife by the husband, which as anything 
but a form had already fallen into disuse when history begins. 
Both these forms transferred the wife from the power (potestas) 
or hand (manus) of her father into that of her husband, to whom 
she became as a daughter. For all purposes, sacred and profane, 
she passed from the one family to the other.1. But just as 
inanimate property, which normally passed from hand to hand 
by a special ceremony of transfer, might acquire a new owner 
by long unchallenged possession and use, so was it also with 
human property. The woman who without either of the two 
ceremonies mentioned was given by her father to a man and 
lived with him as his wife for a whole year without interruption 
became in law his wife by use (wsus) and passed as completely 
im manum marite as if she had eaten with him the sacred cake. 
All these three modes of marriage were in existence at the 
time of the drawing up of the XII Tables, and whichever of 
them she chose, the woman passed into the family and into the 
power of her husband. Yet her position differed in two essential 
respects from that of the Oriental wife. She was her husband’s 
only wife. At no period of Roman history are there any traces 
of polygamy or concubinage.2, And not only was she the sole 
wife, but the tie which bound her to her husband was difficult 
to break and rarely broken. [It is true that each form of union 
could be undone by a certain prescribed ceremony—confarreatio 
by diffarreatio, coemptio by remancipatio. But these were 
resorted to rarely, and it would appear only for grave offences, 
the council of relations being first called in to give judgment.? 


1 Cf. on the religious marriage Dion., yuvatka yauetiy thy Kata yduous 
fepods cuveASovoay avdp) Kowwvdy amdvtwy elvat Xpnudtwv Te Ka) fepay (Bruns, p. 


2 The concubinate of which we hear in Roman law is a form of union, 
bereft of some of the civil rights of marriage, not the relation of a married 


_ man to a secondary wife. 


3 Bryce, Studies in Jurisprudence, vol. ii. p. 403. The offences for 
which, according to Dionysius, ii. 25 (Bruns, p. 7), she was brought to 
trial before a council of relatives were, however, punishable with death. 
They were adultery and wine-drinking (tatra—oi cuyyeveis peta Tod avdpds 
ed{xa¢ov). "The grounds for divorce stated by Plutarch are poisoning the 
children, the use of false keys, and adultery. Divorce for any other reason 
was punished by confiscation of property. The wife could not leave her 
husband in any case. (yuvaikl wh didods &modeimev &vbpa, yuvaina de didovs 
€xBddAew emt papmakeia Téexvwy 7} KAELOaY bTOBoAT Kal porxevbeioay: et eS dAAws 
Tis amoméuWaito, THs ovclas abTod Td mEev THS yuvakds elvat, TH dE THS Anuntpos 
iepbv keAebwy. Bruns, p. 6; cf. Girard, p. 154.) Divorce by the husband 
was recognized in the XII Tables. The husband takes the wife’s keys 





208 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


It does not appear that the wife had any means of repudiating 
the husband, or of emancipating herself from his manus. In 
practice marriage was so nearly indissoluble that the divorce of 
his wife by Spurius Carvilius Ruga in 231 B.c. was declared to 
be the first instance! known since the foundation of the city. 
On the other hand, it must be remembered that the unfaithful 
wife might be put to death without trial, and that the husband 
who had other good causes of complaint would be supported by 
the family council in executing or in repudiating her.’ 


9. Such was the primitive Roman marriage with the manus. 
But even in the days of the XII Tables a wholly different union 
had made its appearance. If the enjoyment of property was 
broken for awhile before the year was out, no title to it arose 
out of the usufruct. This idea was applied to marriage by 
usus, and already in the time of the XII Tables we find that 
if the cohabitation was broken for three nights in every year, 
the wife did not become the property of the husband. When 
or how it became a custom to convert this breach of cohabita- 
tion into a system, and so establish a form of marriage in which 
the wife did not pass into the manus of the husband, we do 
not know. What is certain is that this new form of free mar- 
riage rapidly ousted its older rivals. The bride now remained 
in her father’s power, she was still a member of her own family, 
and by consequence had no position in that of her husband. 
Subject to the nominal control of her father or her guardian, 
she thus acquired complete control of her own property, and 
became, in fact, her own mistress. She was not in theory a 
free woman unless emancipated. She was only free from her 
husband. But it need hardly be pointed out that the practical 
control of relations with whom as a married woman she no longer 
lived was not likely to be a very serious matter, and in point 
of fact, where it was felt to be irksome, it was from time to 
time limited by law. Thus the father had naturally, as a part 
of his potestas, the right to break the marriage at will. But 
this logical application of the paternal power was abolished 


away and turns her out of the house. ‘“‘ Ulam suam suas res sibi habere 
jussit, ex XII tabulis, claves ademit, exegit’’ (Cic. Phil. ii. 28. Bruns, 
p- 22). 

1 Ruga’s wife was divorced for sterility, and Lord Bryce takes the sweep- 
ing statement of the authorities to mean that it was the first instance of 
a divorce in which no crime was alleged (ii. 403). 

2 At the same time, if Plutarch (Rom. 22) is to be trusted, it was a 
religious offence to sell her as a slave (rdv 8 drodduevoy yuvaina Werbai 
xPoviots Oeots (Bruns, 7). In this point she enjoyed a material advantage 
over the children. 


WOMAN AND MARRIAGE UNDER CIVILIZATION 209 


under the Antonines, or restricted to cases where there was 
grave cause for its exercise.! 
_ On the other hand, the tutela was a reality for unmarried 
women, and the Roman law never seems to have fully acknow- 
ledged that the consent of the adult woman, and her consent 
alone, was the one necessary condition to her marriage. Origin- 
ally, indeed, the consent of the parties does not seem to have 
been required at all. This would be all in accordance with 
primitive ideas. But here again the law was modified as time 
went on, and the consent of the woman, as well as the man, 
became a normal and, in some cases, a legally necessary con- 
dition. Further, with the general emancipation of women 
the necessity for a guardian appears to have gradually died 
away.® Hence the Roman matron of the Empire was more 
fully her own mistress than the married woman of any earlier 
civilization, with the possible exception of a certain period of 
Egyptian history, and it must be added, than the wife of any later 
civilization down to our own generation. Practically independent 
of her father, she was legally independent of her husband. She 
could bring an action against others and, with some limitations, 
against him. She could hold property and dispose of it 


1 The separation of a wife from her husband by her father was forbidden 
by Antoninus Pius, but was permitted ‘‘ magna et justa causa interveni- 
ente’’ by his successor (Sir F. Jeune, Ency. Brit., art. ‘‘ Divorce,” p. 471; 
Girard, p. 155). The son also acquired the right to emancipation in case 
of ill-treatment (Girard, 183). 

* The consent of the parties was, of course, required if they were sui 
juris. On the other hand, by the strict logic of the law, if either was in 
tutela, and this would be the normal case with a girl (and even with a 
grown-up woman), the affair would have been one for the guardians alone. 
Thus Ulpian (v. 2) says, “‘ Consentiant si sui juris sunt, aut etiam parentes 
eorum si in potestate sunt” (cited by Girard, p. 147 note). The Lex Julia 
(A.U.C. 736) gave an appeal from the guardians, if they refused consent, 
to a court. Further, the best jurists, including Ulpian himself, held the 
consent of the parties to be necessary as well as that of their guardians. 
““Nuptiz consistere non possunt nisi consentiant omnes; id est qui 
coeunt, quorumque in potestate sunt’”’ (Digest, XXIII. ii. 2). With this, 
however, we must read: “‘Sed que patris voluntati non repugnat con- 
sentire intelligitur. Tune autem solum dissentiendi a patre licentia filiz 
conceditur si indignum moribus vel turpem sponsum ei pater eligat” 
(Just Digest, XXIII. i. 12. Cited in Viollet, Droit Civil Frangais, p. 404). 

3 Originally all women were in tutelage. ‘‘ Veteres voluerunt feminas, 
etiamsi perfect etatis sint—in tutela esse—exceptis virginibus vestalibus, 
quas ... liberas esse voluerunt; itaque etiam lege XII Tabularum 
cautum est” (Gaius, i. 144, 145, in Bruns, 21). On the extinction of the 
tutela, see Girard, pp. 196 and 213. 

4 In case of adultery the husband could originally kill the wife. The 
Lex Julia compelled him to prosecute, the punishment being relegatio. 'The 
same law punished fornication with women of rank (Girard, Manuel 
elémentaire du Droit Romain, 160, 176). 


i 


210 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


freely... On the other hand, being separated from his family, 
she does not succeed to his property if he dies intestate, nor do 
her children succeed to her, nor she to them. So much followed 
from the strict theory of marriage without the manus, though 
here, as elsewhere, natural feeling had its way, and practical 
rules were introduced by the Pretorian legislation to prevent 
consequences which would seem harsh to the temper of the time. 

These changes naturally affected the stability of marriage. 
We have seen that under the old law divorce was rare and 
difficult, but the revolution effected in marriage by the dis- 
appearance of the manus was nowhere more conspicuous than 
in its effect upon the permanence of the marriage tie. By the 
newer form of marriage neither did the wife pass into the hus- 
band’s family nor the husband into the wife’s family. They 
remained distinct persons, distinct individualities, and as they 
freely entered into the marriage relation, so could they freely 
leave it. Divorce, in short, as in so many primitive tribes, 
stood freely at the choice of either party. In the best time of 
the Republic divorce without adequate cause incurred penalties, 
a pecuniary fine, or, still more serious, the nofa censoria. But 
with the growth of the new form of marriage opinion rapidly 
changed, and, as Lord Bryce points out, we find at the close of 
the Republic not only Pompey, but “‘ such austere moralists as 
Cato the Younger and the philosophic Cicero”? putting away 
their wives. The reader of Cicero’s letters who is unacquainted 
with the Roman law of divorce will perhaps remember the 
shock of surprise with which, after becoming well acquainted 
with Terentia from many allusions he suddenly finds Cicero 
calmly referring to his divorce and re-marriage. At this period 
divorce had, in fact, become as commonplace an incident of life 
as marriage itself. 

How far the freedom of women had the demoralizing results 
which have been generally attributed to it by those whose 
business it has been to paint the Roman Empire in the darkest 
colours, is a matter on which the best authorities do not speak 
with confidence. It must be remembered that our accounts of 
Roman social life are drawn in part from satirists like Juvenal, 
or satirical historians like Tacitus, and that we should be as far 


+ Girard, p. 159. The dos or dowry brought by the wife from her own 
family’s resources to the maintenance of the joint life passed originally to 
the husband; but while he continued to administer it, his right over it 
became more and more restricted in favour of the wife, so that the jurists 
(e.g. Ulpian) speak of it as being her property, and this is recognized by 
Justinian, who gives her a right to reclaim it on the dissolution of the 
marriage from whatever cause (Girard, pp. 922-926). 


WOMAN AND MARRIAGE UNDER CIVILIZATION 211 


_ astray in taking their description as an impartial account of the 
_ society in which they lived as we should be if we accepted the 
_ picture of our own social life as it could be painted for us by 
some preacher of reform, or some contemporary censor of morals. 
The satirist has a great function in the world, but it is not that 
of supplying the historian of manners with material ready for use 
without analysis. Other sources are the writings of Christian 
fathers, who from a different point of view were even more prone 
to denounce the wickedness of the world as they found it. 
The very fact that the Romans took so serious a view of 
_ feminine profligacy militates against the belief that the corrup- 
tion had gone quite so deep as is generally supposed. Lucius 
Piso declared that modesty had vanished since the censorship of 
Messalla and Cassius in 154 B.c.1 Yet we have the testimony 
of Velleius that in the proscription of the Second Triumvirate, 
while the sons were never faithful and freed-men only sometimes 
so, the wives could be trusted always. The freedom of divorce 
was abused, as it is in the present day in America. According 
_ to Seneca there were women who reckoned the years not by the 
consuls, but by their husbands, but. this, again, is obviously 
‘satire. On the other hand, there are instances of three, four, or 
five wives, and, again, of three to five husbands. A marriage of 
forty-one years is recorded as unusually long, and in this case 
the wife had urged divorce and re-marriage upon her husband 
after the death of their daughter, for the sake of getting children. 
This, however, is remote in sentiment from anything like pro- 
fligacy, and connects itself rather with the primitive idea of the 
hecessity of children. The literature of the time has stories of 
faithful wives as well as of profligate women to record—stories of 
Wives accompanying their husbands in suicide, dying with them 
in proscriptions, or going with them into exile. Every one knows 
of Arria, who thrust the dagger first into her own bosom, and 
then offered it to her husband, with the words, “ Pete, non 
dolet.” But we do not all know that she became a kind of 
‘heroine of the time, and upon a gravestone in Anagnia is addressed” 
along with Laodamia by a woman who asks her to receive her 
/ soul.? 
The evidence of the tombstones, which in all ages bear a 
(singular family resemblance, shows that the domestic ideal held 






| 1 Friedlander, Sittengeschichte Roms., i. 475. Friedliinder’s whole dis- 
| 2ussion (pp. 475-507) is instructive, if somewhat indecisive. The judgment 
| o£ Professor Dill, whose work has appeared since the above was written, 1s 
| nore clearly favourable (Roman Society, pp. 77, 79, 145, etc.). 

| #? Friedlander, i. 514. 


212 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


sway under the free manners of imperial Rome, as under the 
masculine despotism of the East or the sentimentality of the 
West. A panegyric on Murdia in the second half of the first cen- 
tury says all gravestones of women must be alike, “‘ because their 
virtues admit of no heterogeneity, and it is enough that all have 
shown themselves worthy of the same good report.” ‘All the 
greater renown has my dearest mother won, who has equalled 
and in no way fallen behind other women in modesty, rectitude, 
chastity, obedience, household work, carefulness and loyalty.” 
Another inscription says, “‘ She was of pleasant address and noble 
gait, took care of her house and span.” In another, the husband 
has sworn not to take another wife. Another, “I await my 
husband.’”’; another, ‘“‘ Never have I experienced a pain from 
thee, except through thy death.” 

Upon the whole, the Roman matron would seem to have 
retained the position of her husband’s companion, counsellor 
and friend, which she had held in those more austere times 
when marriage brought her legally under his dominion. 


10. To understand how Roman marriage became modified in 
the Middle Ages we must retrace our steps and hark back to the 
two other influences mentioned at the outset. The first of these 
need not detain us long, for the primitive law of the Germanic 
tribes which overran the Roman Empire closely resembled 
the early law of the Romans themselves. The power of the 
husband was strongly developed; he might expose the infant 
children, chastise his wife, dispose of her person. He could 
not put her to death, but if she was unfaithful he was, with 
the consent of the relations, judge and executioner.1 The 
wife was acquired by purchase from her own relatives without 
reference to her own desires,? and by purchase passed out of 
her family. She did not inherit in early times at all, though 
at a later period she acquired that right in the absence of male 
heirs. She was in perpetual ward, subject, in short, to the 
Chinese rule of the three obediences, to which must be added, 


1 Conversely the adultery of a man is no offence against his own wife, but 
only against another husband. The proprietary view appears strongly in 
the old English law. “If a freeman lie with a freeman’s wife let him pay 
for it with his wergild, and provide another wife with his own money ’— 
7. e. to replace his mistress who has been slain by her husband (Howard, 
Matrimonial Institutions, ii. 35). 

* Whether it was the woman or the guardianship over her which was 
technically sold is a fine legal point, on which a host of authorities may be 
seen arrayed on both sides in Howard, i. 260,261. The only ethical points 


in question are (1) whether her consent was necessary; (2) what rights she 
enjoyed when sold. 


WOMAN AND MARRIAGE UNDER CIVILIZATION 213 


as feudal powers developed, the rule of the king or other feudal 
superior.' And the guardianship or mundiwm was frankly 
_ regarded in early law rather as a source of profit to the guardian 
than as a means of defence to the ward, and for this reason it 
fetched a price in the market, and was, in fact, saleable far down 
in the Middle Ages. Lastly, the German wife, though respected, 
had not the certainty enjoyed by the early Roman matron of 
reigning alone in the household. It is true that polygamy was 
rare in the early German tribes, but this, as we have seen, is 
universally the case where the numbers of the sexes are equal. 
Polygamy was allowed, and was practised by the chiefs. 

This primitive marriage system came into contact not only 
with the Roman Law, but with the still more powerful influence 
of the Church. The Church regarded marriage as a concession 
to the weakness of the flesh. It is not a sin, and those who 
denounce it as such are severely reprobated. Nevertheless it is 
of the nature of a hindrance in spiritual duties. It is incom- 
patible with the performance of the sacraments, and thus 
continence is enjoined on priests. It was, indeed, only after a 
long struggle that the celibacy of the priesthood was established 
as a law of the Roman Church. Such a prohibition was mooted 
at the Council of Nice, but not carried, while by the rejection of 
the proposal at the Sixth Council the Eastern Church escaped 
from this burden altogether. Nor was it till the time of Hilde- 
brand that it became the definitive rule in the West. With 
regard to the laity, the chief concern of the Church was to 
save souls by preventing the deadly sin of fornication. Hence 
came several results; on the one hand, the form of marriage 
was reduced to its simplest possible terms. The mere statement 
of each party that they took one another as spouses was deemed 
sufficient, providing that the mutual pledge referred to the present 
(per verba de presentt).2 Even witnesses were not necessary, 
though, of course, they were in practice required in order to 
prove that the pledge had been made. It was the duty of 
the parties to have a wedding ceremony in church—in fact, it 
became a breach of law and morals to marry by any other form, 
but the omission of such a ceremony did not affect the validity 
of the marriage.® 


1 Waitz, Verfassungsgeschichte, i. 57-60. 

2 At least from the time of Alexander III. The controversies as to the 
exact condition of a valid marriage (e. g. as to whether consummation was 
required, as Gratian maintains, to complete the marriage) need not trouble 

_us here (Howard, op. cit., i. 336, 337. Decret. Grat., 1062 seq.). 

8 For the stages by which the ecclesiastical ceremony grew up, and 

was made legally obligatory, see Howard, i. chap. vii. Lay marriage and 


214 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


In close connection with this law as to the form of marriage 
is the position to which the Church was gradually led, and 
which it finally maintained with great firmness, that the con- 
sent of the parties alone is the only thing necessary to constitute 
a valid marriage. Here the Church had not only to combat 
old tradition and the authority of the parents, but also the 
seignorial power of the feudal lord, and it must be accounted to 
it for righteousness that it emancipated the woman of the servile 
as well as of the free classes*in relation to the most important 
event of her life.1 

A third consequence was that the marriage, once concluded, 
was indissoluble; it was deadly sin for one man to have to do 
with more than one woman, or for one woman with more than 
one man. That being so, divorce in the full sense became 
at once an immorality; there might be separation for grave 
cause, but even that is jealously restricted as giving occasion for 
sin. There might also be annulment of marriage, which is simply 


clandestine marriage, though illegal, remained valid down to the Council 
of Trent in Catholic countries. In England, except for the period of the 
Commonwealth, they were valid down to the passing of Lord Hardwicke’s 
Act in 1753 (Howard, i. 351 and 446, etc.). For the scandalous Fleet 
marriages which made the Act necessary, see 7b., 437 seq. 

1 The early Fathers held by the consent of the parents, and Ambrose 
apparently thinks that the whole matter should be left to them. He 
quotes with approval Euripides— 


vundevudtwy wey Tov eudy warhp euds 

Méptuvay Eker, Kove eudy Kplvew TAde 
and says, “‘ergo quod et ipsi philosophi mirati sunt servate virgines ”’ 
(Decretum Gratiani, Corpus Juris Canonici, 1124). 

In Gratian it is admitted that the “ paternus consensus desideratur in 
nuptiis, nec sine eo legitimze nuptie habeantur,” and he quotes ‘“‘illud 
Evaristi Pape: Aliter non fit legitimum conjugium, nisi a parentibus 
traditur ’’ (p. 1123). But the consent of the parents was incompatible with 
the self-marriage of the parties, which the Church held necessary for the 
avoidance of fornication. Accordingly Gratian’s own view is that consent 
makes marriage (pp. 1062, etc.), though he has difficulty in reconciling 
this with the further condition that consummation should have taken place. 
With these difficulties we are not concerned here. The question of parental 
assent was decided by Innocent ITI., who declared it unnecessary (Viollet, 
p- 406. See Howard, vol.i. p. 336, etc.). The Decretals of Gregory IX. 
are perfectly clear, ‘“‘ Matrimonium solo consensu contrahitur’”’ (Corpus 
Juris, p. 660). 

The Council of Trent, while compelled by the abuses of private marriages 
to declare marriage void if not performed by a priest, anathematizes those 
who maintain that marriage without the consent of the parents is invalid 
(Acts of Cauncil of Trent in Corpis Juris, p. 71). It is, of course, not 
implied that the father has no right of veto, but only that the marriage, 
once consummated, is indissoluble. But further, the daughter who dis- 
obeyed her father’s order to marry was protected by the Church. She 
was declared free of the sin of ingratitude, and is therefore not to be 
disinherited (Owen, Institutes of Canon Law, p. 133). 


WOMAN AND MARRIAGE UNDER CIVILIZATION 215 


a recognition that what purported and was supposed to be a 
marriage, never was a lawful union at all, but there could be no 
putting asunder of those whom God had once joined together. 

Lastly, the moral consequences of any violation of the marriage 
law were held by the Church to affect the man no less than the 
woman. And though the Church never succeeded in converting 
the world to this view, it must be noted here as a departure 
hardly, if ever, paralleled in the history of ethical thought before 
the rise of the spiritual religions.” 

The whole domain of marriage was in the end conquered 
by the Church, but the victory was only gradual. Polygamy 
remained among the Franks in the days of Chilperic and Dago- 
bert, the latter of whom had three queens, and in some districts 
of France, such as Bigorre, concubinage lasted up to the fifteenth 
century. But monogamy speedily became the rule everywhere.? 
In the matter of the bride’s freedom the struggle was more pro- 
longed, and two voices were sometimes heard within the Church 
itself, but from the ninth century onwards the consent of both 
parties was at least supposed, and by the decision of Innocent ITT. 
the consent of the father ceased to be even a necessary condition. 
The feudal power of disposing of widows and orphans was also 
slowly worn away. In 614 we find it repudiated by Clothaire IT., 
yet it survived, and in 1232 we find the Emperor resigning his 
right in this direction at Frankfort. Generally speaking, the 


1 This was the final view of the Church, reached by slow degrees. The 
deliverances of the New Testament being uncertain, the views of the early 
Fathers waver, but nearly all agree that divorce is forbidden except for 
‘*‘ fornication.’’ This term is, however, sometimes given a wider spiritual 
sense so as to include idolatry and even covetousness. But Augustine 
(who had at first admitted the wider view) came to regard adultery as the 
only cause of separation, refused to allow any difference between man and 
woman, and allowed no dissolution of the nuptial bond even for adultery. 
This view was accepted by the Council of Carthage in 407. In its final 
form the Canon Law allowed separation for (1) adultery, the wife having 
an equal right of action with the husband; (2) “spiritual ”’ adultery, which 
came to mean apostasy, and perhaps compulsion of one party by the other 
_ to commit crime; (3) cruelty (Howard, ii. 53). 

2 Gratian quotes Ambrose, who is very precise: “Omne stuprum 
adulterium est, nec viro licet quod mulieri non licet. adem a viro que 
ab uxore debetur castimonia ”’ (Corpus Juris, 1128). 

3 Viollet, p. 388. 

4 Viollet, p. 410. As to the authority of feudal superiors, the Council of 
Trent finds that in the sixteenth century it is still common for secular lords 
to compel men and women in their jurisdiction to marry against their will, 
and denounces the practice sub anathematis pena “* quum maxime nefarium 
sit matrimonii libertatem violare’’ (Council of Trent, p. 74). From an 
early period the Church had given sacramental sanction to the concubinate, 
i. e. marriages of the unfree, or between unfree and free (Howard, i. 276). 
On the other hand, the sacramental view enables the Church to justify 


216 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


families of serfs required authorization to marry, and in England 
no mark of servile tenure was more resented than the payment 
of the merchet, or fine on marriage, which implied that the right 
of marrying was at the lord’s discretion. In 1408 we find 
the Parlement of Paris contesting the right of the Duc de Berry 
to force a girl of eight into marriage. The king’s right was 
exercised frequently by Louis XI., and Louis XII. forced Alain 
d’Albret to consent to the marriage of his daughter to Cesar 
Borgia. The Council of Trent wholly forbade seignorial inter- 
ference, yet complaints are heard of it as late as 1576 and 1614, 
and in 1623 it was necessary for Philip IV. of Spain to forbid it 
in Franche-Comté. The royal right was still exercised in France 
in the seventeenth century. In the eighteenth it died away, 
save that the king’s consent was still required in the case of 
princes of the blood and grandees. Napoleon made a last effort 
to revive it.? 

Nor did the Church get its own way with regard to divorce at 
one blow. Constantine did not attempt to prohibit divorce, but 
confined himself to the imposition of pecuniary penalties accord- 
ing to the cause. But Theodosius and Honorius in 421 carried 
the matter a step further, prohibiting re-marriage in case either 
husband or wife divorced the other party without sufficient 
reason. The next step was the abolition of divorce by mutual 
consent by Justinian; but this step proved unpopular, and 
the law was repealed by Justin, who substantially re-enacted 
the Theodosian code; and the Church did not get its way in the 
Byzantine Empire until the reign of the Emperor Leo.® 





the dismissal of a mistress for a wife of free status, ‘‘ Ancillam a toro 
abjicere et uxorem cert ingenuitatis accipere non duplicatio conjugii 
sed profectus est honestatis ’’ (Pope Leo, in Decret. Grat., p. 1123). This 
was to invest the most callous and heartless form of wickedness with an 
air of piety. 

1 Connected with the merchet was the fine for incontinence payable to 
the lord, since in the loss of virginity there was a risk that the chance of 
marriage might be lost and therewith the lord’s merchet might never 
accrue. Yet the merchet appears to have been sometimes paid by free- 
men, and not universally by serfs (Vinogradoff, Villeinage in England, 
p. 153). For a striking picture of the arbitrary marriage of serfs by a 
Russian proprietor in the modern period, see Kropotkin, Memoirs of a 
Revolutionist, vol. i. p. 61. 

2 Viollet, p. 410-414. 

3 By the law of Constantine, the wife could divorce her husband for 
murder, the preparation of poisons, or the violation of a tomb. If she 
divorced him for any other cause, she forfeited her dowry and was liable to 
deportation. The husband could divorce the wife for adultery, the pre- 
paration of poisons, and for acting as a procuress. If he divorced her for 
any other cause he forfeited the dowry, and if he married again, the first 
wife could take the dowry of the second. The legislation of Theodosius 


WOMAN AND MARRIAGE UNDER CIVILIZATION 217 


In Western Europe the conquest of the barbarians was gradual. 
In the eighth and ninth centuries the capitularies absolutely 
prohibited divorce, yet exceptions were admitted subsequently 
here and there. In the Canon Law itself traces of a more lenient 
view appear.t Dissolution of marriage for impotence is not in 
accordance with the Roman custom, but, says a rescript of 
Alexander ITI., ‘if the custom of the Gallic Church so had it, 
we will patiently endure it.’ 2 Moreover, a case is recorded in 
which a husband, having been absent for more than ten years 
and refusing to return, a bishop had pronounced him divorced, 
and declared the wife free to marry. Though this decision is not 
confirmed, and nothing apparently came of it, yet it is held, 
in view of the bishop’s sentence, that the children of the wife 
in this case are to be deemed legitimate. All these doubts 
and exceptions were swept away by the Council of Trent, and 
to the present day in countries dominated by the Canon Law 
there exists no divorce dissolving the winculum matrimonii by 
the ordinary law.*’ The Pope, of course, having the power of the 


and Honorius in 421 allowed the wife to divorce for grave reasons, including 
crime, but if she divorced her husband for moderate faults, including 
“criminal conduct,’’ she forfeited her dowry, became incapable of re- 
matriage and liable to deportation. The husband, if divorcing for serious 
crime, retained the dowry; if for “‘ criminal conduct,” he did not retain it 
but could marry again; if for mere dislike, he forfeited the common pro- 
perty and could not marry again. In 449, after an experimental restoration 
of the law of the early empire, Theodosius specified twelve offences (includ- 
ing cruelty and adultery) for which a wife could divorce her husband. The 
same mutatis mutandis applied to the husband, but he could further go upon 
the ground that his wife dined with men without his knowledge, left home 
at night without adequate cause, or frequented the circus, etc., after being 
forbidden to do so. If he divorced her for any other reason, he forfeited 
the dowry and property brought into the marriage. If she did so she 
suffered the same penalty, and could not marry again for three years. 

Justinian took the further step of abolishing divorce by mutual consent 
under penalty of being immured in a monastery, and he re-enacted the 
Theodosian law of divorce by one party with some modifications of detail. 
Divorce by mutual consent was re-introduced by Justin and finally abolished 
by Leo (Bryce, ii. 408, and Howard, ii. 28-33). 

1 Still more clearly do the Penitentials of this period show the com- 
promise necessary to adjust the Canon Law to Germanic custom (Howard, 
li. 45). 

2 Dieoret Greg., 705. In other chapters divorce for impotence is recog- 
nized under conditions. In Gratian’s view it would prevent the com- 
pletion of marriage (for conjugium confirmatur officio), but if occurring after 
consummation, would not be a ground of dissolution (1149). 

3 Decret. Greg. IX., Corpus Juris, p. 713. 

4 On the other hand, down to the Council of Trent, the recognition of 
clandestine marriages on the one hand, and the complicated system of 
restrictions on the other, made the annulment of marriage only too easy. 
On the whole, the marriage tie during the Middle Ages seems to have been 
almost as loose in practice as it was rigid in theory. 


& 


218 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


Keys, can override all laws, but this does not affect the general 
principle, nor does it bring relief to those who are without the 
means of setting the spiritual machinery in motion. 


11. Both as to the tutelage of women and as to the general 
power of the father the early Germanic law in large measure 
reproduced the features of early Rome. Both were modified 
by the impact of civilization, of the civil law and of Christian 
influences. But they were modified in different ways. The 
father’s power decayed more rapidly and more completely than 
the husband’s, and while the unmarried woman became personally 
free, the wife remained sub virga mariti. 

The primitive German father had the power of life and death 
over his children.1 At any rate he could expose them before 
they had taken food,” and he could sell his children certainly, 
and in most tribes probably his wife also, into slavery. Even 
in the seventh century the Church has to admit the right of a 
father to sell a son under seven into slavery.? Down to the 
ninth century the husband was possibly within his rights in 
killing his wife for a “‘ good” reason.4 The Lombard law ran, 
‘Non hcet eam interficere ad suum libitum sed rationabiliter,”’ 
and at Worms, in the eleventh century, witnesses were asked, 
“Est aliquis qui uxorem suam absque lege aut probatione 
interfecerit?’’5 The sale of children had been prohibited in 
the Empire by Diocletian, but the law was found to lead to 
infanticide, and it was again allowed by Constantine, though 
at birth only, and that with an option of redemption. It was 
prohibited by the laws of the Visigoths and by the Carlovingians, 
but instances in which it occurred are quoted from French law- 
books as late as the fifteenth century. The sale of a wife appears 
in the eleventh century at Cologne,® and in the same century 
Cnut had to forbid the sale of a woman to a man whom she 
disliked.’ 


1 Waitz, Verfassungsgeschichte, 49. 

2 Viollet, 497, 499. 

3 Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, ii. 436. 

4 Viollet, p. 500. 

5 Viollet, loc. cit. Even in the Canon Law the murder of a faithless wife 
is somewhat faintly deprecated. Gratian is at pains to show that the 
apparent countenance given by Pope Nicholas refers to the practice of 
civil law alone, but Pope Pius, whom he also quotes, merely says, “ Qui- 
cunque propriam uxorem absque lege vel sine causa et certa probatione 
interfecerit aliamque duxerit uxorem, armis depositis publicam agat 
peenitentiam’”’ (1152). Gratian himself is clear that the murder of an 
adulteress is unlawful (1154). 

6 Viollet, p. 502. ? Pollock and Maitland, ii. 364. 


WOMAN AND MARRIAGE UNDER CIVILIZATION 219 


While these grosser excesses of marital and paternal power 
died away during the earlier Middle Ages, the subjection of 
the wife remained. But of the wife only.1_ From the Conquest 
onwards the unmarried English woman on attaining her majority 
became fully equipped ? with all legal and civil rights, as much 
a legal personality as the Babylonian woman had been three 
thousand years before. But the wife was still, if not the husband’s 
slave, at any rate his liege subject. Her personality is merged 
in his. The law does not hold her responsible even for crimes 
committed in his presence, and therefore it is presumed under his 
influence and authority. If she kills him it is petty treason— 
the revolt of a subject against a sovereign in a miniature 
kingdom. She could not bring an action against him nor he 
against her. But, of course, the theory could not be pushed to 
its full length. The wife was human, and so, after all, were 
the legists, and if ill-treated she could go to the ecclesiastical 
courts for protection, and if the husband was obstinate they 
could call in the power of the secular arm.* The King’s Court 
would punish him for maltreating her,* but the right of chastise- 
ment remained, and the history thereof, together with the whole 
theory of marriage thereunto appertaining, is explained with 
much unconscious humour by Blackstone. 

‘“‘ The very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended 
during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated 
into that of the husband, under whose wing, protection and 
cover, she performs everything.” /Hence a man cannot grant 
anything directly to his wife,or contract with her, “for the 

1 While unmarried women become emancipated, the wife remains sub- 
ject to her husband’s correction. In Normandy, in the thirteenth century, 
it is held that a man could not be prosecuted for beating his wife, slave, 
son, or daughter, or any one “en sa mesgnie.”” And it is the same in 
other parts of France, though in Flanders the magistrates condemned a 
husband for beating his wife till the blood flowed. The subservience of 
the wife was expressed by her waiting at table, kissing the husband’s knees 
and calling him her lord (Viollet, pp. 503-504). As to property, however, 


in France and some parts of Germany a doctrine of community of goods 
grew up in which the husband had the right of management, but the 


‘rights of the wife were considerable. And owing to the law of dower, 


the French wife in the thirteenth century could institute an action without 
her husband’s consent, which at present she cannot do (Viollet, p. 293). 
Here, however, we touch on the indirect consequences of laws of property, 
rather than on customs flowing from the central conception of the position 
of women. 

2 Pollock and Maitland, ii. 437. The writers do not consider it clearly 
established that a life-long tutela of women ever existed in England, as 


-among the other Germanic peoples. 


3 In 1224 a wife obtained a writ directing a sheriff to provide her with 
maintenance out of the husband’s lands (Pollock and Maitland, ii. 435). 
* Pollock and Maitland, ii. 436. 


220 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


grant would be to suppose her separate existence, and to cove- 
nant with her would be only to covenant with himself.” He is 
bound to provide her with necessaries, but for anything besides 
necessaries he is not chargeable. She can bring no action 
without his concurrence, nor be sued without making him a 
defendant. In criminal cases she may be convicted and punished 
separately, but she is considered as acting under his orders, and 
in some felonies (though not murder) she is excused, if acting 
under his constraint. 


“The husband also (by the old law) might give his wife 
moderate correction. For, as he is to answer for her misbe- 
haviour, the law thought it reasonable to entrust him with the 
power of restraining her, by domestic chastisement, in the same 
moderation that a man is allowed to correct his apprentices 
or children.” ... “ But this power of correction was confined 
within reasonable bounds, and the husband was prohibited from 
using any violence to his wife, ‘ aliter quam ad virum, ex causa 
regiminis et castigationis uxoris sue, licite et rationabiliter 
pertinet.’ The civil law gave the husband the same, or a larger 
authority, over his wife, allowing him for some misdeamours, 
‘flagellis et fustibus acriter verberare uxorem’; for others, 
only ‘modicam castigationem adhibere’ (Nov. 117, c. 14). But, 
with us, in the politer reign of Charles II., this power of cor- 
rection began to be doubted, and a wife may now have security 
of the peace against her husband; or, in return, a husband 
against his wife. Yet the lower rank of people, who were 
always fond of the old common law, still claim and exert their 
antient privilege, and the courts of law will still permit a 
husband to restrain a wife of her liberty in case of any gross 
misbehaviour. These are the chief legal effects of marriage 
during the coverture, upon which we may observe, that even 
the disabilities which the wife lies under are for the most part 
intended for her protection and benefit. So great a favourite 
is the female sex of the laws of England.” 4 


12. With Blackstone we arrive at the middle of the modern 
period, and we find the position of woman somewhat anomalous. 
In particular, the legal status of the married and unmarried 
woman stood in strong contrast. The gradually deepening 
sense of personal rights extended itself to women as well as to 
men, and we have seen that the Church worked along with 
the growing sentiment of social justice to emancipate the un- 
married woman from bondage, and make her her own mistress 


1 Blackstone, vol. i. pp. 430-433 (edition 1765). 


WOMAN AND MARRIAGE UNDER CIVILIZATION 221 


h 
‘in the most important matter of her own marriage. Women 
as such, had few, if any, disqualifications as to the tenure of 
. property, as to inheritance, and as to the full exercise of legal 
and civil rights.1 Though still debarred from the professions, 
they were, generally speaking, competent as witnesses, could 
sue and be sued like a man, could inherit and bequeath freely ; 
few, if any, relics of the t¢utela remain beyond the years of 
minority.? Further, the sentiment that first becomes marked 
in medizval literature had given them a position in the esteem 
of man which it would be difficult to parallel in earlier thought. 
Yet in law the whole personality of the married woman was 
as much as ever absorbed in that of her husband. In this 
direction the old conception of the right of the husband was 
modified rather than combated by the influences of religion 
and the romantic attitude to women and marriage. For if 
these influences emphasized the beauty of womanliness, it was 
a beauty which depended on meekness and self-denial. The 
strength of woman was in her weakness. She conquered by 
yielding. Her gentleness had to be guarded from the turmoil 
of the world, her fragrance to be kept sweet and fresh, away 
from its dust and the smoke of battles. Hence her need of 
a champion and guardian. Again, in the romantic view of 
marriage the two beings were united in one, and this was easily 
interpreted to mean that the woman was merged in the man 
and against him was rightless, or had a claim to protection only 
in the most extreme cases. Thus the law, as Blackstone with 
his sleek satisfaction expounds it, was not far removed from 
prevailing sentiment either in what it gave to women or in what 
it withheld. Yet Blackstone wrote two centuries after the 
Reformation, and the Reformation had already begun to break 
1 Except in relation to property the history of the position of women 
was broadly alike on the Continent and in England. 
2 I need not here deal with exceptions which are interesting enough as 
survivals. For certain disabilities in modern French law, see Viollet, p. 291. 
8 Two opposed streams of thought are discerned in the Christian teaching 
_astowoman. On the one hand, Christianity, and particularly Catholicism, 
was essentially a feminine religion. Its appeal was to the womanly type, 
and among women at all periods it has found its heartiest response. 
Though debarred from the priesthood, as saints, martyrs, and virgins, 
women occupied a high place in the hagiology, and a woman was the mother 
of God. On the other hand, woman was no less certainly the door of hell, 
the source of temptations, the corrupter even of the saints. The filthiest 
view of love and marriage was taken by the ascetics and is embodied in the 
Penitentials. The horrible saints of the desert could scarcely bear to see 
a sister or a mother (Lecky, ii. 127). A fair estimate of the influence of 
Christianity as a whole, for which, perhaps, sufficient material has not yet 


been accumulated, must at least give full weight to both these tendencies. 
On the whole subject, see Lecky, especially vol. ii. p. 316 seq. 


222 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


up the canonical view of marriage. The Reformers differed 
from the Romish Church in two points of capital importance 
They declined to regard marriage either as a Sacrament? or as 
a concession to the weakness of the flesh. On the contrary, 
they considered it the most desirable state for man. Hence, 
on the one hand the abolition of celibacy amongst the clergy, 
and on the other the tendency to treat marriage as a civil contract 
and the revival of divorce, freedom in which latter respect was 
advocated by many great Protestant writers, and notably by 
Milton.2 But in cutting itself free from the legal and moral 
structure built up by the medizval Church, Protestantism failed 
to provide a clear and consistent standard of its own. The 
conception of the marriage relation as a civil contract was not 
at bottom compatible with the rigorous treatment of the most 
venial sexual irregularity as a religious offence of the deepest 
dye, and the Old Testament influences which made the husband 
absolute head of the family suited ill with the measure of equality 
already conceded to the wife.* Hence, even in Protestant 
countries legislation moved but slowly, and on the whole it was 
only during the nineteenth century and under new influences 
that the law of marriage and the position of women underwent 
a fundamental change. The modern conception of personal 


1 7. e. not in the magical sense. In the spiritual sense, Luther regarded 
the word “sacrament ”’ as necessary to express the holiness of the marriage 
state (Howard, i. 387). 

2 Adultery and malicious desertion, widened so as to include cruelty, 
were reckoned by the continental reformers generally as good causes of 
divorce, and it was agreed that re-marriage was allowable to the innocent 
party (Howard, ii. 62, 65, etc.). The English reformers followed somewhat 
more cautiously in the same line (2b., p. 73). 

5 The influence of the Old Testament told both ways on the reformers. 
On the one hand, it aided them in cutting down on the whole to reasonable 
limits the absurd mass of restrictions on marriage which the medieval 
Church had accumulated. On the other, it tended to justify a barbaric 
view of the prerogatives of the husband, and led Luther and other early 
reformers to admit polygamy and concubinage. 

The fierceness of Puritan sentiment in regard to the sins of the flesh 
appears to combine Old Testament barbarism with early Christian con- 
demnation of unchastity. The early reformers considered death the appro- 
priate penalty for adultery, and in the American colonies, where Pro- 
testantism most influenced legislation, savage penalties were imposed, not 
only for adultery, but even for the pre-nuptial incontinence of betrothed 
persons, e. g. couples who had children born within seven months of mar- 
riage were publicly flogged. See the extraordinary collection of sentences 
in Howard, vol. ii. p. 169 seq. Here are records of sentences: “‘ A. F., for 
having a child born six weeks before the ordinary time of women after 
marriage, fined for uncleanness and whipt, and his wife set in the stocks.”’ 
“ C. E., for abusing himself with his wife before marriage, sentenced to be 
whipt publicly at the post, she to stand by while the execution is performed. 
Done, and he fined five pounds for the trouble ’’ (p. 186). 


WOMAN AND MARRIAGE UNDER CIVILIZATION 223 


rights proved to be incompatible with the old marriage law, and 
indeed with the medizeval sentiment in regard to women. Apply- 
ing the doctrine that moral worth and the adequate realization 
of character imply full responsibility, it has dismissed as a piece 
of false sentiment the ideal of feminine innocence shrouded from 
the world, has bade women take their own lives in hand, and in 
considerable measure broken down the barriers which debarred 
them from other occupations than that of marriage. Within 
mairiage it has revolutionized the position of the wife, giving 
back to her the personal independence which she enjoyed under 
the later Roman law. This change was not consummated in 
England until the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 
1882. As we have seen from Blackstone, women had acquired 
personal protection from the wife-beating husband during “ the 
politer reign of Charles IJ.,’”’ but their property, except where 
protected by settlement, remained at the absolute disposal of 
their lord and master. This protection was a privilege of the 
daughters of the propertied classes. There was literally no 
protection for the wife of a drunkard struggling to support her 
children by the labour of her hands from the husband who 
should choose to sponge upon what she earned. Such earnings 
were emancipated from the husband’s control by the Act of 
1870. In 1882 the same principles were applied to all property ; 
and the English law, which was the most backward in Europe, 
became in twelve years the most forward, Russia and Italy, 
strange combination, being the only other countries which fully 
recognized the independence of the wife’s property in the absence 
of a settlement.’ 

1 Though there have been times in earlier history when women have, 1n 
fact, taken a prominent part in intellectual or public life (witness, e. g. 
India in Buddha’s time), the systematic and reasoned insistence on the 
claims of women to free admission to any occupation for which they can fit 
themselves, seem—apart from the case of Plato—to be almost confined to 
the latter half of the modern period. Works in defence of women’s rights 
appear sporadically in England, France, and Germany, from the end of the 
seventeenth century onwards. The first which is now at all remembered, 
however, is probably Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication, published in 
‘1792 (Howard, op. cit., iii. 238, 239). f 

2 The movement of other countries is, however, in the same direction. 
Sweden emancipated the wife’s earnings in 1874, Denmark in 1880, 
Norway in 1888; the German Civil Code places the wife’s earnings amongst 
her separate property which is beyond the husband’s control. Property 
bequeathed to the wife is separate only when so stipulated by the donor. 

Our Married Women’s Property Act applies to England and Ireland only. 
In Scotland, by the Acts of 1877 and 1881, the wife acquired complete 
control of her earnings and iricome from personalty. But she may not 
dispose of the principal sum without her husband’s consent. It should, 


however, be borne in mind that the Scottish common law gave the wife 
substantial claims on the husband’s estate. 





224. MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


13. Thus the tendency of the modern marriage law is to 
guarantee to the wife equality of civil status, with full legal 
protection for her person and free disposal of her property. 
We are next to consider its effect upon the permanence of the 
marriage tie. In the previous stages of the development of 
marriage which have been traced we have seen it treated— 

Ist. As an imperfectly-organized relation which does not 
identify husband and wife as members of one family. 

2nd. As an act of appropriation by capture, purchase or 
service, whereby the wife has passed into a semi-servile relation. 

3rd. As a sacrament, whereby an indissoluble union was 
created which man could not undo. 

4th. In the Roman Law, and perhaps in that of Egypt, as a 
contract on specified terms, revocable at the will of one party or 
of both, or, finally, voidable under certain specified conditions. 

The law of modern countries since the Reformation appears to 
have fluctuated between the two latter conceptions of marriage. 


The French law is not easily to be compared with ours. Here and in 
similar codes there are mutual obligations which, in a measure, compensate 
the wife for a certain loss of liberty. The code states that the husband 
owes her protection and the wife owes him obedience. She is under an 
obligation to live with him, and he to receive her and furnish her with 
everything necessary for the wants of life according to his means and 
station. She has the absolute right to the one-half of everything he earns, 
but, on the other hand, she may not, without authority, alienate property 
even if it be her own, nor can she sue even if she be carrying on a trade, 
nor make a contract, without his authorization. On the other hand, if the 
authorization is unreasonably refused, she may apply for it to a court. 

In one direction the primitive marital power is maintained in a modified 
form in some continental, particularly in Latin, countries. In France the 
husband still has the right to kill the paramour of his wife taken in the 
act. This is perhaps of the nature of a concession to the strength of passion. 
But further, the husband, and he alone, can denounce his wife to the 
tribunals for adultery, and cause her to be imprisoned for not less than 
three months or more than two years at his pleasure. ‘“* Le mari restera le 
maitre d’arréter l’effet de cette condamnation en consentant a reprendre sa 
femme ”’ (Penal Code, 336, 337; Viollet, p. 505). This is a survival of 
the law of the Ancien Régime, by which the husband might immure the 
adulteress in a monastery, or even in a house of correction, by an authority 
obtained from the king. The imprisonment might be for life. 

The German Civil Code breaks wholly with the marital power, by 
equalizing the crime of husband and wife. Yet it preserves the private 
character of the offence by making adultery punishable with imprisonment 
on the application of the injured party. 

The Portuguese under the old régime erected a monument more durable 
than brass to the Catholic interpretation of equal moral responsibility by 
a law which punishes the adultery of the wife with from two to three years’ 
hard labour, and of the husband, if committed under the conjugal roof, 
with a fine of not less than £2, nor more than £480. 


1 In this relation, the religious marriage may fittingly be enumerated as 
a distinct type. 


WOMAN AND MARRIAGE UNDER CIVILIZATION 225 


Countries which have maintained the rule of the Roman Church, 
of course, do not allow divorce under any circumstances what- 
ever. ‘This is the case with Italy, Spain and, till the revolution, 
Portugalin Europe; and with Mexico, Brazil, Chili, the Argentine 
Republic, and most of the South American States. In some 
states of mixed religions the Canon Law is applied to Catholics : 
thus in Austria there is no divorce even if one party to the 
marriage should not be a Catholic The same rule applies in 
Hungary. 

The Greek Church, adhering in the main to the traditions of 
the Roman Law as re-modelled by Justinian, allows divorce, 
and it is an interesting point of historical continuity that the 
law of divorce in Greece at the present day is, with unimportant 
amendments,” that established by Justinian.® 

In France divorce was unknown until 1792, and a wife could 
not even obtain a separation from an unfaithful husband. In 
that year the Convention went to the other extreme, admitting 
divorce, not only by mutual consent, but even for incompati- 


1 In Bavaria and in Wurtemberg, before the consolidation of the German 
law under the new Imperial code, there was no absolute divorce for Catholics, 
but the restriction did not apply to mixed marriages (Parliamentary 
Papers, 1894; Miscellaneous, No. 2, p. 24). 

* Parliamentary Papers, 1894; Misc., No. 2, p. 81. 

3 The law of the Greek Church is followed pretty closely in Servia. 
Divorce cases are tried by the spiritual courts, and the grounds are: 
Adultery, an attempt on the life of either consort, treason, leaving the 
Church, “if the wife without the husband visits the baths, beer gardens, 
or other suspicious places with men, or if the husband brings strange 
women into his house, or keeps them elsewhere,” an accusation of adultery 
against an innocent wife, or urging her to unchastity, condemnation to 
seven years’ imprisonment, desertion for seven years or for three years, 
if the husband has left the country and cannot be traced, or for four years 
if it is proved to be wilful. 

In Russia the rules of divorce vary according to the religion of the parties, 
but it is admitted both for the Russo-Greek and the Lutheran in cases 
where the fault of one party has violated or practically nullified the marriage 
contract (Parly. Papers, ib., p. 128). 

In the case of members of the Russo-Greek Church, the grounds of 
divorce are: Adultery (though only when provable by an eye-witness), 
impotence, a sentence involving a loss of civil rights, five years’ desertion. 
_ It should be noted that the guilty party may be condemned to celibacy for 
adultery. Among members of the Lutheran Church the grounds are: 
Adultery, prenuptial unchastity of the wife, attempt to poison, five years’ 
desertion, repugnance to marital intercourse, refusal to fulfil conjugal 
duties, incurable infectious disease, madness, depravity of life, cruelty and 
offensive treatment, attempted dishonour, unnatural propensities, crimes 
involving capital punishment or penal exile. ee 

In Roumania divorce is allowed by mutual consent of the parties, 
provided that the court is satisfied that the maintenance of a common life 
is impossible, that the separation is sanctioned by the parents, and provision 
is made for the maintenance of the wife and children (Parly. Papers, 1b., 
pp. 126, 127). 


Q 


226 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


bility of temper alleged by one party. There was a re-action 
under the Directory in 1795, and in 1797 the Church re-affirmed 
the indissolubility of marriage. Napoleon, however, allowed 
divorce by mutual consent under some restrictions." On the 
restoration of the Bourbons divorce was entirely suppressed 
(1816), and though its re-introduction was voted by the Chamber 
in 1831, it was thrown out by the Peers, and there was no divorce 
in France until 1884. Under the law of that year and of 
1886 the grounds of divorce are equal for either party, and. 
are— 
(1) Adultery. A 
Exces. ‘ 
(2)4 Sévices. . 
Injures graves. 
(3) Conviction for crimes involving certain aggravated 


& 


punishments. 
‘“ Excés ” is interpreted to mean acts of violence endangering 
life; “sévices,’ other acts of violence; while as to “ injures i 


involving lesser misconduct, the courts have a wide discre- 
tion. They take it generally to cover calumnious imputations, 
desertion, refusal of cohabitation, and habitual drunkenness.? 

In Germany the revolutionary epoch left its mark, and by 
the Prussian Code of 1794 divorce was allowed for any of ten 
causes, including mutual consent in case of insuperable aversion 
where the marriage was childless, and even if there were children 
where the cause was held good by the judge. But under the 


1 The husband had to be over 25, and the wife over 21; they must 
have been married more than two and less than twenty years. The 
approval of the parents was required, and a proper agreement had to be 
made for the maintenance of wife and children. In other respects, how- 
ever, the law was not equal between husband and wife, as she could not 
claim divorce for adultery unless with certain aggravations (Jeune, art. 
** Divorce,” in Ency. Brit.). 

2 Belgium preserves the Imperial Code of 1803, but Holland, though the 
law of marriage is, in general, based on that code, restricts the grounds of 
divorce to adultery, malicious desertion, imprisonment for over four years, 
and ill-treatment endangering life (Parly. Papers, ib., pp. 33 and 100). 
The Grand Duchy of Luxemburg, keeping closer to its original, “ allows 
the mutual and continued consent of both parties ” under legal conditions 
and tests to be “a sufficient proof that life in common is insupportable to 
them ”’ (Parly. Papers, 1b., p. 90). 

In Switzerland, the recognized causes are adultery, an attempt on the 
life of either party, cruelty, grave indignities, infamous crime or base con- 
duct rendering married life intolerable, malicious desertion for two years, 
insanity (under certain conditions), and, finally, conduct rendering married 
life unbearable. This represents a slight modification, carried in 1907, of 


the older law, which was criticized as facilitating dissolution for trivial 


causes (Report of Divorce Commission, p. 24; cf. Parly. Papers, Misc., 
No. 2 of 1894, p. 150). 


WOMAN AND MARRIAGE UNDER CIVILIZATION 227 


new civil code, which came into force on January 1, 1900, the 
conditions are more stringent, the grounds recognized being— 

(1) Adultery; which, it is to be observed, is further punish- 
able by imprisonment on the application of the innocent party. 

(2) Endangering of life. 

(3) Desertion.} 

(4) Insanity. 

(5) Gross neglect of duties by one of the parties or the 
leading of such an immoral or dishonourable life as entirely 
destroys the conjugal relations. 

Denmark? and Sweden recognize adultery, desertion, and 
conviction of serious crime, as causes of divorce. Norway, by 
the Act of 1909, has gone much further and admitted divorce 
after a separation of three years, or a shorter time if there has 
been a formal decree. Portugal, by the Act of 1910, also allows 
divorce by mutual consent under certain conditions.® 

Thus the divorce laws of Europe present an almost bewildering 
variety. To find some order and method in them we may group 
them under four heads. 

- There are (1) the countries which remain under the Canon 
aw and admit no divorce. 

There are (2) countries or populations governed or influenced 

y the law of the Greek Church, running back to Justinian. 
_ There are (3) the countries governed or influenced by the Code 
Napoléon. 

’ And (4) there is the group of Protestant countries. 

The common tendency in the last three cases is to place 
divorce upon an equal footing for both parties, and to permit 
it in all cases where the act of one party without the collusion 
of the other has practically nullified the marriage contract. 
Thus, desertion and conviction of serious crimes are generally 
recognized causes; but in countries influenced by the Code 
Civile the element of personal injury is especially pressed, and 
where this is loosely interpreted divorce becomes easy. In the 


1 Provided that the guilty party has for one year refused to obey an 
order for restitution of the conjugal life, or has refused to cohabit for one 
year, having gone abroad or to such place as makes communication difficult 
(Parly. Papers, Misc., No. 2, 1903). 

2 Parly. Papers, No. 2, 1894, p. 53. 

8 ib., p. 146. By appeal to the king’s prerogative divorce may be 
obtained for irreconcilable aversion as well as for other causes (Divorce 
Commission Rept., p. 24). 

4 Report of Commission on Divorce, col. 6478, p. 23. a 

5 ib. The main grounds of unilateral action are adultery, conviction 
of certain crimes, ill-treatment, desertion, incurable lunacy, inveterate 
gambling habits and incurable contagious disease. 


228 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


Protestant countries conviction of crime and the distinct refusal 
of one party to perform his or her duty is more prominent. 
There is, moreover, a partial tendency to divorce by mutual 
consent which appears most noticeably in the most recent laws. 


14. In the United Kingdom the history of the Divorce Law is 
altogether peculiar. The Scottish courts began to grant divorces 
soon after the Reformation, and in 1573 recognized desertion, 
as well as adultery, as a cause; this remains the Scottish law | 
to the present day. But in England the course of events was 
different. ‘The Commission appointed by Henry VIII. and 
Edward VI. recommended divorce for adultery, desertion and 
cruelty, and Lord Northampton (temp. Edward VI.), who married 
again after a separation a mensa et thoro, was held justified, but 
the recommendations of the Commission never became law, and 
in Foljambe’s case at the end of Elizabeth’s reign marriage was 
held indissoluble. In 1669 the first divorce was granted by 
private Act of Parliament, but there were only five such Acts 
before George I.’s time, and it was not till 1857 that divorce 
was allowed by English law, and this law differs from that 
of the majority of continental countries in not recognizing the 
practical destruction of the marriage life through desertion, 
crime or drunkenness as a ground for anything more than 
separation. Neither does it place husband and wife on an 
equal footing. Down to 1884 the courts could enforce an 
order for the restitution of conjugal rights by imprisonment, 
but in 1884 this power was withdrawn, and in the Jackson case, 
a few years later, it was apparently held that though such an 
order could be obtained by a husband or wife, it could neither 
be enforced by the courts nor could the injured party be allowed 
to enforce it for himself. Thus the tendency of recent English 
legislation has been to facilitate separation, but not to enable 
him or her who has made the mistake of marrying a confirmed 
criminal, a lunatic or an habitual drunkard to marry again. 

The British Colonies, and with them, of course, the United 
States, started with the English law, but have for the most part 
modified it in the direction of greater liberty. Canada forms 
the exception. In the Dominion, under the influence of the 
Roman religion, no divorce courts have been instituted, and 
none exist except in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince 
Edward’s Island and British Columbia, where they had been 
instituted before the Union, and where the conditions of divorce 
are the same, or nearly the same, as under English law.’ 

1 Parly. Papers, 1894, vol. xx. part iil. p. 54 fis 


WOMAN AND MARRIAGE UNDER CIVILIZATION 229 


f 
| In South Africa the Roman Dutch law in Cape Colony recog- 
_ nizes adultery and graver sexual offences, malicious desertion, 
' perpetual imprisonment, long absences and refusal of marital 
privileges as grounds of divorce, but in practice it appears 
_ that only the first two causes are brought forward. Natal 
also recognizes desertion in addition to adultery. In the 
_ Australasian group divorce is either on the English lines or 
modified so as to admit desertion, drunkenness and crime as 


\ grounds.2 





: 


15. The divorce laws of the United States form a study by 
_ themselves, and the utmost that I can attempt is a summary 
of the principal features. In one state or another twelve 
different causes of divorce are recognized; they are— 

(1) Adultery. This is recognized generally as a ground of 
divorce. 

(2) Bigamy. General. 

(3) Impotence. General, but as a rule with the require- 
ment that the plaintiff must be ignorant of the fact at the time 


of marriage. 

(4) Idiocy. Most states. 

(5) Wilful desertion. The term varying from six months to 
five years. This is usually a ground of absolute divorce, but 
sometimes of separation only, and as a rule the deserted party 
must not have consented to it or have rejected reconciliation. 


1 Parly. Papers, cd. 1785 (1903), p. 21. 

* South Australia, Queensland and Tasmania adhere to English law 
(Parly. Papers, 1894, vol. Ixx. pp. 15, 16, 33, 95). New South Wales 
places husband and wife on an equal footing in the matter of adultery 
provided the husband is domiciled in the colony: (Parly. Papers, 1903, 
ed. 1785, p. 13). It also recognizes desertion, cruelty, conviction for 
crime, and habitual drunkenness; while, further, it is a ground of divorce 
if the wife has ‘“‘ habitually neglected or rendered herself unfit to discharge 
her domestic duties; or if the husband has habitually left the wife without 
the means of support” (2b., p. 14). Victoria recognizes desertion, im- 
prisonment and habitual drunkenness. This must be coupled, in the 
‘case of the husband, either with cruelty or with the charge that he has 
“ habitually left his wife without means of support’; on the part of the 
wife, “‘ with neglect of her domestic duties.”’ Adultery by the husband 
in the law of this colony is only a sufficient ground of divorce if committed 
in the conjugal residence, or coupled with circumstances or conduct of 
ageravation (Parly. Papers, 1894, vol. Ixx. part i. p. 19). New Zealand, 
which, till 1898, adhered closely to the English law, now recognizes im- 
prisonment for serious crime, desertion and habitual drunkenness, coupled 
with cruelty on the part of the husband, or habitual neglect of domestic 
duties on the part of the wife (Parly. Papers, 1903, cd. 1785, p. 16). 
Since 1908 lunacy under certain conditions is also a clause (Div. Rept., 
p. 20). West Australia since 1912 recognizes very similar conditions 


(ib., p. 21). 


230 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


(6) Absence. New Hampshire and Connecticut. 

(7) Neglect of husband to support wife. ‘Twenty states, 
but in some of these it is a ground of separation only. 

(8) Habitual drunkenness for a term of years. Almost all 
states. 

(9) Use of opium. Two states. 

(10) Conviction of felony. The greater part of the country. 

(11) Extreme cruelty. Almost all states, but in some only 
as a ground of separation. 

(12) Indignities to the person. Hight states. 

To these may be added a variety of causes, recognized in one 
state or more. In Illinois divorce may be given at the general 
discretion of the court. In Washington? divorce may be given 
for any cause deemed by the court sufficient, and when it shall 
be satisfied that the parties can no longer live together. In 
South Carolina there is no divorce at all.® 


1 The summary given in the text is derived from Parly. Papers, 1894, 
Misc., No. 2. The statements given by W. F. Wilcox (Ency. Brit., ed. 10, 
article ‘‘ Divorce ’’) may be summarized as follows: In six out of seven 
states divorce is allowed for adultery, desertion, and cruelty; in thirty- 
nine states for imprisonment, in thirty-eight for habitual drunkenness, 
in twenty-two for neglect to provide. In all states but two, complete 
separation lasting from one to five years is a ground of divorce (7b., art. 
‘‘ Marriage,” p. 549). From the summary statement in the Report of the 
Divorce Commission (p. 27) there appears to have been no essential 
change. 

2 Bryce, Studies in Jurisprudence, ii. 440. 

* The charge brought by critics of the United States marriage Atal 
however, is not so much directed against loose rules of law, as against lax 
interpretation by courts. This is carried so far in some states, that it 
would seem as though divorce were placed at the free disposal of either 
party. One wife alleges that her husband “‘ has never offered to take her 
out riding ’’; another, that he quoted verses from the New Testament 
about wives obeying their husbands; a third, “that he does not come 
home till ten o’clock at night, and when he does come home he keeps 
plaintiff awake talking.’’ These cases, with further details which have 
their ludicrous side, are quoted by Lord Bryce (op. cit., vol. ii. p. 445) from 
a report of the United States Labour Bureau of 1880. The number of 
divorces granted in the Union increased from 9,937 in 1867, to 25,535 in 
1886, a proportion of 250 to 100,000 married couples. In some of the 
laxer states, however, the proportion is much higher, there being in Ohio, 
for instance, some 3,000 divorces annually to from 33,000 to 44,000 marriages. 
In two-thirds of the suits the wife is the plaintiff, but statistics combat 
the suggestion that desire for another marriage is the common cause of 
divorce. Thus, in Connecticut, where the figures are best available, only 
one-third of those divorced re-marry in each year. A further point of 
high importance is that the number of divorces in proportion to the popula- 
tion does not vary with the number of causes for which divorce can be 
obtained—e. g. in 1880, New York admitted adultery only as a cause; 
New Jersey added desertion, and Pennsylvania further added cruelty and 
imprisonment. Yet New York had 78 divorces per 100,000 couples ; New 
Jersey 26, and Pennsylvania 16 (Howard, iii. 217). 


WOMAN AND MARRIAGE UNDER CIVILIZATION 231 


16. Comparing the divorce laws of modern states as a whole, 
. the general tendency, notwithstanding the bewildering differences 
- in detail, is tolerably clear. Legislation moves in the direction 
pot allowing divorce for adultery, cruelty, persistent desertion, 
_ habitual drunkenness, serious crime—in short, for such behaviour 
of one party as makes the married life impossible or unbearable 
to the other. So far the dissolution of marriage is regarded as 
a relief which one party may claim on the ground of the other 
party’s delinquency, and in a measure as the punishment of that 
delinquency. But there is also a more radical movement, not 
so marked but apparently growing, to regard marriage con- 
 sistently as a contract voidable, like other contracts, by the 
agreement of the parties to it, and to restrict the function of 
the state to the duty of seeing that no fraud is committed, and 
that the involuntary parties to the original contract, the children, 
do not suffer. 

In any case, marriage, in modern legislation, is more a con- 
tract thanasacrament. Itis arelation which binds two parties 
together without annulling the legal personality of either, and 
is terminable by the fault of either. In ethics, the change that 
it has undergone may be expressed by saying that from being 
a sacrament in the magical, it has become one in the ethical, 
sense. Regarded as a magical sacrament, marriage is a rite 
which removes the taboo on sexual intercourse between a man 
and a woman, while at the same time imposing a lifelong taboo 
on the intercourse of either of them with a third ‘person. As 
an ethical sacrament, marriage is the fruition of perfect love, 
in which, at its best, men and women pass beyond themselves 
and become aware through feeling and direct intuition of a 
higher order of reality in which self and sense disappear. If 
it is not given to all to obtain this best, yet the humbler lessons 
of unselfishness and mutual aid are learnt by ordinary men and 
women in greater or less degree irom marriage,.and. seldom 
effectually learnt from other sources. But this “ethical concep- 

_ tion implies the retention of full personal rights by the wife, 
and though doubtless realized often enough under the older 
quasi-servile marriage, that was because the facts of human 
nature and the relations based upon them cut deeper than all 
law, and wives have been men’s helpmates and sometimes their 
tyrants even when law made them most abjectly their slaves. 
The modern view of marriage recognizes a relation that love 
has known from the outset. But this is a relation only possible 
between free self-governing persons. If it be true that “ woman 
is not undeveloped man, but diverse,” that diversity will best 


232 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


express itself through her freedom to act as a responsible agent, 
and only when so expressed can we justly measure its character 
and amount. Such freedom is the basis of marriage as an 
ethical sacrament, and that conception of marriage is accordingly 
bound up with the general liberation of women. 

entiated from that of men than it afterwards becomes, but there 
is a tendency for the heavier drudgery to fall on them, while the 
men do the hunting or fighting. At a higher stage the sphere 
of woman becomes more clearly restricted to the house. She 
does hard outside work only when compelled thereto by poverty, 
and the idea grows that she should be protected by her men-folk 
and as far as possible sheltered from the world. She becomes a 
different being, romantically conceived as of finer, more ethereal, 
texture than the male, but is practically allowed no will or 
character of her own. At a still further stage the ethical con- 
ception of personality comes into play. To be the ideal being 
that man would have her it is recognized that woman must be 
a responsible agent, and it is seen that her special talents and 
qualities must have all the scope which freedom gives to come 
to the fulness of their development, while it is only through free 
development that the extent of her differentiation can be deter- 
mined. Roughly parallel to this movement of thought is the 
evolution of the marriage tie as we have traced it—the natural 
family at first incomplete and the marital relation loose and 
uncertain ; next, a close union under the lordship of the husband, 
based in its lower forms on proprietary right, and at a higher 
stage on religious sanctions; and, finally, a union, not less inti- 
mate because less mechanical, between two free and responsible 
persons, in which the equal rights of both are maintained, based 
not on a magical sacrament, but on the most sacred human 
relation. 


CHAPTER VI 
RELATIONS BETWEEN COMMUNITIES 


1. In the early stages of ethics, rights and duties do not attach 
to a human being as such. They attach to him as a member of a 
group. A stranger may enter a community with a safe conduct, 
or under the protection of some god or some taboo. He may 
come as a guest under the egis of his host. But except under 
such special conditions he is destitute of rights. The members 
of the community will give him no protection because he is not 
one of themselves. They stand by one another, but, except for 
such special reasons as have been mentioned have no concern 
with outsiders. Morality is in its origin group-morality. This 
division between the community and the stranger cuts deep 
into the ethical consciousness. In primitive society it implies a 
very narrow circumscription of the ethical area, since primitive 
societies, besides being exclusive, are generally small. But, far 
from being confined to primitive society, the essential features of 
group-morality are maintained with great persistence, though in 
very varying shapes, into the higher civilizations. Civilized 
humanity is still organized in groups, and there is still a deep 
distinction between the obligations binding members of the same 
group to one another and those which are recognized as holding 
as between members of different groups. Every independent 
nation is such a group. In greater or less degree every distinct 
class within a nation is such a group. Religious bodies, political 
parties, all sorts of voluntary associations and, finally, the family 
itself, are other instances. 

But here one distinction is to be noted. All these groupings 
may be the basis of special obligations, but it does not follow 
that they all alike maintain group-morality in its distinctive 
features. For these distinctive features consist not so much in 
the recognition of special obligations as in the denial of more 
general rights and duties arising out of more general relations. 
The special and the general need not necessarily conflict. The 
one may supplement the other. It is where a wider obligation 
is ignored or overridden in favour of the narrower that we speak 

233 


234 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


of group-morality.t A great part of the comparative study of 
ethics consists in tracing the forms assumed by group-morality 
and its modification by wider ideas of obligation, and much of 
ethical evolution is constituted by the interaction of the two 
principles. In the present chapter and the next we shall con- 
sider the two departments in which this evolution appears to 
be of the greatest importance, We shall begin with the mutual 
relations of independently governed communities and their 
respective members. 


2. Early society is, as has been said, organized generally in 
small groups, and between these groups and their respective 
members there is not, except under special conditions, any bond 
of mutual regard. Hence, man being a pugnacious creature, it 
is natural that disputes should arise and that they should be 
settled by recourse to arms. To represent primitive man as in 
a state of perpetual warfare with his fellows is, indeed, a gross 
exaggeration. Normally border relations are friendly, and there 
are some peoples, particularly in the lowest economic grades, who 
seem naturally mild, unaggressive and peaceable, and to whom 
war is unknown. Such were some of the Eskimo.” Such are 
one or two small, favoured and isolated South Sea Island peoples.® 
Such are some of the Asiatic jungle peoples. But these, after 
all, are rare exceptions,® and among the great majority of peoples 
disputes arise which from time to time give occasion for the resort 
to arms. 

The actual frequency and seriousness of warfare, of course, 
vary very greatly, according to the more or less martial character 

1 The term is, of course, one of disparagement, so far as we assume the 
correctness of the modern point of view. It may, however, be, and at 
times has been, that the more humanitarian view is too crudely expressed, 
and the group-morality which protests against it may then prove to be 
relatively right. 

* For example, the people of Baffin’s Land had no warfare, and Ross 
could not make them understand the meaning of battles (Reclus, 108). 

3 The Lower Carolinas are said by Waitz to live at peace, while furnish- 
ing the upper islands with arms. In the small islands of the Tokilan and 
Ellice group no weapons are known except those washed ashore, which are 
stored in the temples (Waitz, v. ii. 190). 

4 The little Kubu family groups do not fight among themselves and 
never corne into contact with others. If menaced, they run away (Hagen, 
p. 70). The Punans rarely have fights either within or between groups, 
the only exceptions known to our authorities being cases where they have 
been egged on by other tribes (Hose and McDougall, ii. 183). 

5 Among tribes of whose “ foreign’ relations we obtained information 


we found twelve which could be said to have “‘no war,” ten in the hunting 
or lowest agricultural stage, one in the higher pastoral where war was 


said to be rare, and one in the highest agricultural, where it was mild 


(Simpler Peoples, p. 232). 


RELATIONS BETWEEN: COMMUNITIES 235 


of the people, their geographical conditions and economic cir- 
cumstances. Regular organized war implies a certain social 
development, and is hardly to be found at the lowest grades, but 
we find “a sort of’ warfare in the form, perhaps, of perpetual 
predatory raids, as where an outcast tribe like the Bushmen 
live largely by pillaging its more settled neighbours, who reply 
whenever they can with pitiless massacres.1 We find fighting 
arising from disputes about the infringement of the tribal 
border—the “ frontier incidents” of savagery—as often among 
the Australian clans.2. It may arise out of personal injuries, the 
capture of a woman or the slaying of a man, which the injured 
tribe is determined to resent. In this latter case there is no 
very deep distinction between a war of distinct tribes and the 
blood feud of two clans within a tribe.* In both cases the 
fighting may be of the nature of a trial by combat, and so it is, 
perhaps, that we find here and there a regular arrangement of 
the campaign in which time, place, and even the number of the 
combatants and their weapons are predetermined. Thus, in the 
Malay region, clan disputes are sometimes settled by duels, or 
by battles arranged at fixed times and places. Among the 
Battas of Sumatra the relatives of the combatants mingle freely 
while the war is in progress. Yet the actual fighting is waged 
to the extermination of the beaten party, saving always its 
chief.4 The tale of the Horatii and Curiatii preserves the memory 
of a custom of “representative fighting’? among the early 
Latin tribes, and instances occur in Greek history down to 
the sixth century.5 We may, perhaps, connect with this range 


1 Letourneau, La Guerre, pp. 56, 57, quoting Moffat, Twenty-three Years 
an Central Africa. 

2 Letourneau, 7b., p. 29. Border relations, however, according to 
Messrs. Spencer and Gillen (Native Tribes of Central Australia, p. 32), 
are generally amicable, and there is no such thing asa constant state of 
enmity. 

8 Technically, the term feud should be used of a fight within what 
is, for many purposes if not for all, one community, or of a fight waged by 
a part of a community—e. g. a kindred avenging amurder. War should be 
used of a fight organized by a community as a whole. But the distinction 
is difficult to carry through, as the normal organization of a fight with 
@ hostile tribe may be by a volunteer party under a chief chosen ad hoc. 
This is common, e.g. among the North American Indians. 

4 Waitz, v. i. 161, 162. In some peoples, though there may be no 
precise arrangements as for a judicial combat, a very little bloodshed 
seems to appease the martial ardour of the combatants. Thus, among the 
Micronesians, it is said, wars break out on small pretexts, but on the death 
of two or three warriors the rest run away, and offer gifts which terminate 
the war. Yet prisoners are often tortured and the land laid waste (Waitz, 
V. 11. 132). 

® Herodotus, Book I. chap. lxxxii. 





236 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


of ideas certain indications of what we might call a sportsman- 
like view of war. Instances might be found among the North 
American Indians—for example, in the story of the Arkansas 
giving a share of their powder to the Chickasaw to fight with 
them, or of the Algonquin refraining from pressing an attack on 
the Iroquois on its being pointed out that night had fallen.t 

Apart from this half-judicial, half-chivalrous view, the warfare 
of savage and primitive societies is not always without its rules 
and limitations. Often an open and honourable declaration of 
war is insisted on, as among the Kaffirs,? and in early Rome. 
The persons of envoys are, asa rule, respected, and often women 
are employed for this purpose. Agreements are understood and 
bad faith is condemned.4 We even hear of instances in which 
the use of poisoned weapons is avoided,® and in which permanent 
injury to property is forbidden.® 


1 Waitz, iii. 154. For a similar case among the Australians, see 
Letourneau, op. cit., p. 33. . 

2 Waitz, ii. 398. 

5 Cicero, De Republica, ii. 17, quoted in Bruns, p. 11. 

* e.g. the N. A. Indians had their regular flags of truce, peace councils, 
and pipes of peace (Catlin, N. A. Indians, ii. 242). In early Rome 
those who offended against a foreign nation by an attack on envoys, were 
made over to them (deditio) to deal with as they pleased. By an intricate 
perversion of moral sentiment, the people might refuse to ratify a truce 
made by a general in the field on its behalf, but in that case surrendered 
the general, as though it were he who had broken his word to the injured 
enemy. By this vicarious sacrifice the commonwealth was to be relieved 
from all guilt (ut populus religione solvatur), the injury being put on to 
the head of the general who had done his best for it (quandoque noxam 
nocuerunt . .. ob eam rem hosce homines vobis dedo,. Livy, ix. 10; 
thering, Geist des Romischen Rechts, i. 131). In all this, however distorted, 
a feeling of the obligation of good faith between nations is indubitably © 
present, 

5 e.g. among the Kaffirs (Waitz, 11. 398, 399). According to this au- 
thority, the Kaffirs also avoided the starving out of an enemy, and, generally 
speaking, showed a certain chivalry in war which they have unlearnt 
in contact with the whites. 

* Among the Eastern Carolinas, the victor carries off the movables, but 
does not take the land of the vanquished, and avoids cutting down their 
fruit-trees (Waitz, v. i. 118, 119). Even the Book of Deuteronomy, 
which lays down a kind of ideal code of extermination, based on religious 
principles, deprecates the cutting down of fruit-trees, but rather for the 
advantage of the invader than for any more magnanimous motive: ‘“‘ For 
thou mayest eat of them, and thou shalt not cut them down: for is the 
tree of the field man, that it should be besieged of thee ?’’ (Deut. xx. 19). 
Quaint illustrations of savage chivalry occur where some primitive con- 
eeption, colliding with the ordinary instincts of warfare, places enemies 
under a sacred obligation to each other. Instances may be found among 
some of the Indian hill tribes, for whom hospitality is so sacred a duty 
that a defeated enemy can avail himself of it against his conqueror. M. 
Reclus (p. 261) mentions the ease of a Bengalese clan being driven out of 
their homes by an enemy, and coming to claim asylum as guests with their 
conquerors, to whom they proved so expensive as lodgers, that it became 


RELATIONS BETWEEN COMMUNITIES 237 


3. But while war, like other departments of savage life, has its 


_ customs and obligations, and while in some of them we can trace 
' germs of moral feeling, of honour and fair play, we must not 


blind ourselves to the broad fact that this same rule of custom 
generally lends to savage warfare something of the character 
of a personal feud. We shall not be far wrong in saying of 
uncivilized warfare in general terms that it is in its essence as 
much a struggle between individuals as between communities, 
that the conquered enemy has no recognized rights of immunity 
to protect him, but that his person and property, his wives and 
children, stand at the mercy of the conquerer. As in other 
departments of ethics, so here, we find that this principle is not 
always pushed to anextreme. There are all manner of variations 
in the rigour with which it is applied, and still more in the 
practical consequences drawn from it. Here and there we find 
touches of humaner feeling investing themselves with a religious 
sanction. In other cases social circumstances mitigate the lot 
of captives. But in the main the defeated enemy is rightless, 
and is treated as best suits the victor’s convenience. 

This will readily appear from a brief survey of the possible 
alternatives in the treatment of prisoners. Quarter may be 
refused altogether, or if the prisoner is taken he may be enslaved, 
tortured, eaten, adopted, ransomed, exchanged, or liberated. 
Further, a distinction may be, and in practice often is, drawn 
between the adult males among the enemy on the one hand, and 
the women and children on the other, e. g. the males may be put 
to the sword, while the women and children are enslaved or, 
perhaps, adopted. Coming now to the actual practice of savage 
and barbarous races, we find that, at least so far as regards males, 
the milder alternatives are by far the rarer. Of exchange there 
are several instances among the North American Indians— 
for example, in the tribes of New California, where, though 
enemies are killed in battle, they are not scalped, and prisoners 
are not enslaved, but exchanged.1_ Ransom is also very seldom 


more profitable to restore the lands and goods taken from them. The 
Same author mentions the case of a murderer playing the same trick upon 
the father of the murdered man, who not only could not touch him as long 
as he was his guest, but was compelled to support him—a situation which 
could only be paralleled by that of the N. A. Indian widow, who might be 
appeased for the murder of her husband by the adoption of the murderer 
in his place. 

1 Waitz, iv. 241. But they would seem to take women captives, as one 
of their war-songs begins: ‘‘ Let us go, leader, to the war, let us go and 
make booty of a fine maiden.”’ Catlin (ii. 71) relates that the Comanches 
kept a little white boy as a prisoner, and finally exchanged him for three 
members of their own tribe bought by the whites from the Osages. 


238 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


understood by savages, but the Creek Indians were said to 
adopt boy and girl prisoners and to hold grown men and women 
for ransom, though apparently they were also subject to an 
ordeal, as it is stated by the same authority (an eighteenth- 
century writer who lived among them) that the women of the tribe 
were wont to make payment in tobacco for the privilege of whip- 
ping prisoners as they passed.1 The third alternative was that 
of adoption, which, especially among the North American Indians, 
forms the main exception to the rule that the prisoner is only 
saved in order to become aslave. For several tribes saw another 
use, based upon another phase of savage ideas, to which he 
could be put. He might impersonate a deceased warrior of the 
tribe. It is a part of savage make-believe that one man can 
stand for another, that a man’s personality can be transferred, 
possibly by the supposed transfusion of the soul, possibly by a 
ceremonial investiture with the names, rights and possessions of 
the deceased. It was a fairly common practice among the Red 
Indians to spare prisoners for this purpose. They had, in the 
first instance, to undergo an ordeal, a severe whipping or other 
torture, and then, if a widowed woman of the tribe chose to 
adopt one as her husband, he might live and become a member 
of the tribe, replacing the dead man in every respect, as husband 
to his widow, as father to his children, as bearer of his totem, as 
successor to all his rights and duties—in short, as perpetuating 
his personality.? 





Among two hundred and fourteen peoples we find evidence of the in- 
discriminate killing of the conquered in one hundred and five cases, and 
of the killing of men only in forty-one more. It is fair, however, to say 
that in the first number we include cases of head-hunting, which do not 
necessarily imply that the injured are slain in any large numbers, or even 
that quarter would be normally refused. We find sixty cases in which 
both sexes may be enslaved, thirty-two in which women and children are 
enslaved, thirty-nine cases of adoption, and eighteen in which prisoners are 
exchanged or set free. In many cases, of course, more than one practice 
is followed by the same tribe (Simpler Peoples, p. 232). 

1 Caleb Swan, in Schoolcraft, v. 280. 

2 Catlin gives it as the general practice of the Indians known to him 
that they inflict appalling tortures on their prisoners, in sufficient numbers 
to atone for those similarly dealt with by their enemies, while the re- 
mainder were adopted as husbands by widows in the tribe (op. cit., ii. 
240). The element of fiction comes out strongly when we learn that a boy 
may be adopted in place of a deceased husband, and is then called father 
by the children of the deceased (Schoolcraft-Drake, i. 218-220). Among 
the Dakotas male prisoners were seldom taken, except by previous arrange- 
ment, which would be made when the warriors of the tribe wished to take 
one or more for adoption to recruit their number. The fate of the warrior 
would in this case depend upon the decision of the war-chief (School- 
craft-Drake, i. 188). Among the Iroquois, prisoners had to run the 
gauntlet all through the villages lying near the line of march. At the 


RELATIONS BETWEEN COMMUNITIES 239 


44,.To pass to the more severe alternatives, the refusal of quarter 
in battle is widespread. In North America we find it in place 
of either torture or adoption among the Apaches,! the Chepe- 
wyans,” and generally among the Californian tribes.? In negro 
warfare the defeated are often annihilated. The men are killed 
sometimes for eating, sometimes merely for the killing; the 
women and children are sometimes killed, sometimes enslaved. 
The Waganda and the Masai killed all the adult males, the 
Bechuana took no prisoners. The Fans took them, but ate them. 
The Gallas first massacred indiscriminately in Abyssinia; they 
now castrate their male prisoners.4 But mere killing did not 
always suffice; an easy death might be too good a fate for an 
execrated foe. Torture, which, as is well known, reaches its 
most extreme development among the North American Indians, 
seems to be due to no more recondite motive than that of 
revenge. Thus, according to Catlin,® prisoners are tortured in 
sufficient numbers to atone for those similarly dealt with by 
their enemies; and it is stated that children are encouraged to 
take part in the process in order to instil hardness and vindic- 
tive feelings into their minds. The rude Takhali, according to 
Waitz,® give their children a regular training in cruelty, especially 
to animals—as though this were necessary. Torture is com- 





journey’s end they might be adopted by those who had lost relations, and 
when bereaved families were satisfied, if the remaining prisoners seemed 
desirable acquisitions to any family the gauntlet test would be applied to 
them. They would be lashed by the women and children, and those who 
fell from exhaustion under the ordeal would be dispatched, the survivors 
being adopted. It should be added that when adopted captives became 
discontented with their new life, they were in some cases set at liberty. 
Adoption, as already mentioned, was in this tribe the rule for the treat- 
ment of women and children captives (Schoolcraft-Drake, i. 218, 247; 
Morgan, League of the Iroquois, 341-344). Morgan adds that a distinguished 
chief was sometimes restored to his own people as a mark of admiration. 
He was then bound in honour not to fight against his conquerors in 
future. 

Outside the North American Indians we do not hear so much of adop- 
tion, but according to De Rochas (quoted by Letourneau, op. cit., p. 49) it 
occurs in New Caledonia, presumably when the victors’ larder does not 
need replenishing, or when the need of making good the losses of the 
village is more pressing. Similarly among the Andamanese, Man (J. A. I., 
xii. 356) states that though women and children may be killed in a night 
attack on a village, the child, if taken alive, would be treated kindly, in 
the hope of inducing it to join the captor’s tribe. 

1 Reclus, p. 128, but Waitz (iii. 157) says that the Apaches sometimes 
tormented their prisoners, sometimes sold them. 

2 Waitz, loc. cit. 

3 Powers, Tribes of Calfornia, 405. 

4 Post, Afrik. Jurisprudenz, i. 84, 85. , 

5 Catlin, ii. 240. 6 Waitz, ili. 117. 


240 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


monest among the eastern and southern tribes of North America, 
and did not occur among all the tribes of the West.1 The hor- 
rible history is only lightened by the extraordinary stories of forti- 
tude with which it was borne and by occasional instances of self- 
sacrifice, such as that of a certain Chippewa chief, Bi-ans-wah, 
who, having been taken captive, was saved by his father, a noted 
warrior, who voluntarily surrendered himself to the conquering 
tribe and offered himself for torture in his son’s place. It is one 
of the few gleams of light which break the darkness of savage 
history to read that later in life the rescued Bi-ans-wah made 
an agreement with the Sioux by which the burning of prisoners 
was stopped on both sides. 

The next alternative to torture is that of cannibalism. 
Cannibalism may have either a magical, a religious, or a 
purely materialistic value; and, as warfare develops and becomes 
systematic, and especially as some barbarous tribe consolidates 
itself and grows stronger than its neighbours, the practice 
assumes gigantic proportions. Prisoners are not merely killed 
and eaten on the spot,? but are taken home, well treated and 
fattened for the slaughter, possibly provided with a wife and 
encouraged to breed a family for the same purpose. There comes, 
indeed, a stage, perhaps the most revolting in the history of human 
development, at which the weaker tribes are made almost to 
perform the functions of cattle in the economy of life for the 
stronger. This tendency has its parallel—to some extent its 
alternative—in the development of human sacrifice, whether for 
religious or magical reasons. In the higher grade of agriculture 
we find a drop in the proportion of cases of cannibalism reported, 
but a marked rise in human sacrifice (Simpler Peoples, pp. 241- 
242). The human victim may be a feast for the gods. Or it 
may be that by eating the dead man, and particularly by eating 
certain parts of him, such as his heart,* the conqueror is held to 
acquire his virtues, or some occult influence is supposed to be 
exercised upon the crops, the weather, the stability of a bridge, 
or the fortunes of war. 


1 Waits, iii. 157. Except among the North American Indians, I find the 
torture of prisoners but rarely referred to by ethnologists, unless as an 
incident of cannibalism, human sacrifice, or the slave trade. But Waitz 
(v. il. 134) attributes the practice to some Micronesians. It was not 
uncommon in medieval Europe. 

* The suggestively named ‘‘ Niam-niam” are said to advance to battle 
aes the cry, ‘Meat, meat! To the oven, to the oven!’ (Letourneau, 
p. 86). . 

3 For example, among the Yoruba, hearts are regularly sold to give 
courage (Ellis, Yoruba-speaking Peoples, p. 69). 


RELATIONS BETWEEN COMMUNITIES 241 


Cannibalism is, or has been, widely spread + throughout Africa, 
“Oceania, South America and Australia (though it would be 
‘too much to say that it was general anywhere),? and often 
where it is not now a flourishing institution there are distinct 
traces of it in legend® or, as among the Micronesians and the 
Andamanese, in the belief that strangers or neighbouring tribes 4 
are cannibalistic or, again, in certain magical rights and customs 
having a cannibalistic significance. The Melanesians are not 
cannibals, yet they will eat a piece of a dead man’s flesh to estab- 
lish communion with his ghost. Among the North American 
Indians, where it is rare within the times of which we have a 
record, we have phrases like “ eating the heart of an enemy and 
drinking his blood,” which probably are not mere metaphors. 
The Sioux, who in later times abhorred cannibalism, used at 
one time to eat the heart of an enemy. The Chippewas are 
‘said to have practised cannibalism. The name “ mohawk ”’ 
means “ man-eater,’ and in certain tribes there were special 
societies of cannibals who were deemed to possess magical 
powers.® Passing to tropical America, the Caribs, who lived a 
blameless and well-ordered life among themselves, made such 
‘frequent cannibal raids that the very name of “ cannibal”’ is 
supposed to be a corruption of their tribal name. In Guatemala 
and Nicaragua, prisoners were generally’ sacrificed and eaten, 
while it was in ancient Mexico that cannibalism and human 
sacrifice reached probably their greatest development in history. 
The Mexicans maintained an eternal warfare with the Tlaxcala 


1 It is not, of course, confined to captives, though they are the handiest 
material if available. Sometimes the aged are eaten, as among the Battas 
of Sumatra (Waitz, v. i. 189). Sometimes the young. For example, 
among the Central Australians, a younger child is eaten in order to give 
strength to an elder (Spencer and Gillen, i. 475). Sometimes a slave. 
Sometimes it is a gruesome punishment, e.g. for adultery, treason, 
espionage, and robbery by night among the Battas, who also eat their 
prisoners (Waitz, loc. cit., 188). 

2 It is very rare in Asia and North America. We have found only one 
case of cannibalism and none of human sacrifice among Pastoral peoples 
(op. cit., pp. 240, 242). 

3 Enemies are still eaten in the Luritcha tribe of the Central Australians. 
Among the Arunta, cannibalism, if not wholly discarded, is very slightly 
practised, but its memory lives in many traditions of the “‘ Alcheringa ’’— 
the Australians’ ‘“‘ great long ago ’’—and some of the Engwura ceremonies 
are thought to represent its suppression (Spencer and Gillen, i. 324, 473-475). 

4 The Ainus of the Tokapchi district are particularly addicted to night 
attacks, and are alleged to have been cannibals, and are even now abhorred 
by their neighbours (Batchelor, Ainu of Japan, 288). 

5 Codrington, J. A. I., x. 285. 

6 Waitz, iii. 159. 

* According to Torquemada. According to some other authorities, the 
practice was confined to certain tribes (Waitz, iv. 264). 


R 


242 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


in order that the supply of captives for sacrifice might be kept 
up. The victim was identified with the god, and his killing and 
eating meant a resurrection of the god and a renewal of his 
strength. According to the Mexican legend the gods them- 
selves sacrificed themselves to the sun to endue him with strength 
to do his work, and they handed on the duty to their human 
representatives, directing men to fight and kill each other to 
provide the sun with food.2 Among the Guaranis of South 
America a sixteenth-century account describes the cannibal 
sacrifice of prisoners, who, with an exaggeration of cruelty, 
were given a wife previously, and if there was a child it was 
fattened and eaten. 

Finally, with the category of ideas to which cannibalism and 
human sacrifice belong we should connect the head-hunting 
raids especially common in the Malayo-Polynesian region. The 
carefully-preserved skull is at once a trophy and proof of valour, 
a memorial of vengeance, and a property of magic powers. 
Different aspects are specially prominent among different peoples. 
The Nagas of the Indian Hills, all of whom are head-hunters, 
are said to keep the skull to glut their vengeance. In Melanesia 
the idea of human sacrifice is prominent and we are closer to 
cannibalism. For at the funeral of a chief an expedition starts 
off to take heads in his honour, and any one with whom it 
falls in, not being of the chief’s own people, serves the pur- 
pose. The object alleged, in one of the islands—Florida—for 
human sacrifice to the dead, is that “‘ mana’”’ is obtained—the 
mysterious power with which chiefs are endowed in life as well 
as after death, which they can transmit from the grave to those 
who then put themselves into communion with them. Further, 
in another Melanesian island — Ysabel—the human victim is 
eaten, and we have full-blown magical cannibalism; and, to illus- 
trate the affinity of ideas, we find that in Florida, where the 
victim is supposed only to be sacrificed, it is admitted that a 
little flesh is eaten. But with these customs we are passing 
away from the special ethics of war into those of primitive 
religion generally. Head-hunting may be a purely private 
matter. It may be an incident in the making up of a blood 
feud, as among the Lampongs of Sumatra, where the murderer 
must appease his victim’s family with two skulls and a victim 
to be buried at the grave.* It may be a matter of private ven- 


1 Payne, History of the New World called America, i. 470. Frazer, iii. 
134 ff. 

2 Payne, i. 504. ° 3 Letourneau, La Femme, 160, 161, 163. — 

* Godden, J. A. I., xxvii. 15. 

> Codrington, J. A. I., x. 308, 309. 6 Waitz, v. 149. 


RELATIONS BETWEEN COMMUNITIES 243 


-geance or gain or glory, as among the Nagas, where men lurk 
about the water-ghat of a hostile village for the first woman or 
child that comes to draw water. Or it may be, as sometimes 
among the same people, the express object of an organized 
expedition! In the former case it is at most an incident in the 
life of neighbouring hostile villages.’ Only in the latter is it the 
object of regular warfare. 
A horrible feature of Naga head-hunting is that the skull of a 
woman or child, even a baby in arms, in prized as much as a 
man’s. It is even thought a greater feat to obtain one, since 
it implies the boldness of penetrating into the heart of the 
enemy's country. This indiscriminate slaughter of women and 
children is frequent, but not universal, in savage and barbaric 
warfare.2 Among these same Nagas, in the feuds of clans as 
distinguished from the wars between tribes, the women are 
‘sometimes spared. In the quarrels of the Luhuga killing is 
limited by agreement, and the women are not injured. It isa 
bright spot in the sombre picture of the North American Indian 
warfare that women were respected. The reason was a magico- 
religious belief, in which it is open to us to find an ethical 
element, that unchastity would bring misfortune. The Dakotas, 
we are told, “ generally treat female captives with respect. We 
hear of no violation of chastity on their war parties. During 
their absence the cause of their being chaste on their excursions, 
they say, is that they may not bring vengeance down upon their 
own heads—that is, displease the spirits of the deceased and the 
war medicine, as they would be made to suffer for their incon- 
tinency. They must keep themselves from women all the time 
they are out at war. Superstition has a controlling influence 
over them in this as in other respects.” ? Among the Hurons 
and in Virginia, though no quarter was given, as a rule, in the 
fight, women and children were generally made prisoners. The 
‘Winnebagos 4 say that they respect chastity in war at the bidding 
of the Great Spirit. The Iroquois did no violence to women 
‘aptives, and Catlin states this as the general rule of the 
‘Indians that he knew. An exception are the Indians of Texas, 
who treated female captives with cruelty. But the general rule 
‘or women captives was adoption in a servile condition. Simi- 
arly in Oceania, it is stated that in the feuds of the little island 
p43 Godden, loc. cit. 2 Godden, op. cit., p. 13, quoting Sir J. Johnstone. 
i *% Prescott, in Schoolcraft, iv. 63. The magical element in this con- 
eption comes out well in the point that among the Iroquois the war-chief 
tas generally unmarried (Waitz, iii. 158). The general idea is clearly 


1at women are taboo to fighting men as injuring their powers. 
* See Schoolcraft-Drake, i. 188. 





244 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


of Rotuma women are respected, and that in the Carolinas and 
the Marshall and Gilbert Islands women prisoners are generally 
spared. At a higher level, among the Kabyles of North Africa 
we are toid that women are respected in war, and even in an 
assault upon a village are not molested. Sometimes the women 
are so completely free from danger that they come and go with- 
out hindrance in the hostile territory, or look on calmly at the 
battle and perhaps in the end effect a reconciliation. This is 
the more intelligible when the fighting tribes are exogamous, so 
that the wife of a warrior on one side is sister or daughter of a 
champion on the other. In this capacity they act as reconcilers 
among the Kolarian tribes of Bengal.t Often, as among the 
Australians and the Papuans, they are employed as envoys and 
are inviolable.2 But more often, though unmolested in the 
actual warfare, the fate which awaits them as prisoners is no 
enviable one. While the men are tortured, eaten, sacrificed or 
simply killed, the women and children are carried off as slaves.’ 
This is one of the commonest methods of dealing with prisoners 
in the uncivilized world. A slightly higher level is reached 
when the male captives are allowed to share the fate of their 
wives and children. 

For there comes a time in social development when the victor 
sees that a live prisoner is, after all, better than a dead one. 
Speaking generally, the custom of enslaving male prisoners does 
not arise until two conditions have been satisfied. On the one 
hand, a certain level of industrial organization must have been 
reached, making slave labour desirable, unless slaves are taken to 
sell to other peoples as by the Kirghiz; on the other, a certain 
warlike supremacy must have been attained by the slave-holding 
tribe which has familiarized it with the possession of captives, 
and so given scope for the habit of utilizing them to grow up.’ 


1 Reclus, 295. * Letourneau, La Guerre, p. 36. 

3 Among the North American Indians, while the males (unless adopted) 
were generally tortured and killed, women and children were more often 
taken captives, and adopted in a servile position (Waitz, iii. 154, 156). 
The enslavement of women in Black Africa is referred to below. Similarly, 
at the other end of the old world, among the Ainus, the result of the fre- 
quent night-raids, whereby a quarrel between villages is avenged, is that 
nearly all the males are killed while the women and children are enslaved, 
the women often as concubines (Batchelor, 288). In this connection it 
must be remembered that in forty or more peoples practising marriage by 
capture as a full reality, the possession of a woman is the direct object of the 
war or raid. 

4 The proportion of cases in which slaves are taken stands at about 
one-fifth or one-sixth among the Higher Hunters and the two first grades 


of agriculture, and moves abruptly to seven-twelfths in the higher grade 
(Simpler Peoples, p. 232). 


RELATIONS BETWEEN COMMUNITIES 245 


Perhaps a third negative condition may be added, that the 
vindictive passions must be sufficiently held in check to pre- 
vent their gratification in the moment of victory. It is thus 
not until the higher savagery, or, perhaps, the lower levels of 
barbarism, that we find slavery beginning to develop in any 
marked degree, and universally it has fiourished more in races 
capable of permanent and steady labour than with those which 
are either hunters or fighters or nothing. It was impossible 
to create a large slave population among the North American 
Indians east of the Rockies, and we only find the practice of 
slave-holding among them in scattered instances. West of the 
Rockies, on the other hand, slavery is general.!_ In other parts 
of the savage world it is the ordinary alternative to the exter- 
mination of the vanquished. In Oceania, the one method of 
treatment sometimes replaces the other. Thus, among the 
Papuans, war is the more savage and cannibalistic where slavery 
is little practised.2, Or the two methods may be combined, as in 
the Solomon Islands, where, in addition to war, a regular trade 
recruits the slave market, not only, however, for purposes of 
labour, but also for purposes of cannibalism and human sacrifice. 
Again, in Fiji the slaves are not worked hard, but are fattened 
for eating; and throughout Melanesia, on the whole, slavery 
rather subserves cannibalism than opposes it. In Polynesia, | 
human victims were generally chosen from prisoners of war and 
from slaves. In tropical South America prisoners may be put to 
death (and perhaps eaten), enslaved or adopted.? Throughout 
Black Africa the two institutions also coexist, the general rule 
being that where the men are killed, and perhaps eaten, the 
women and children may be enslaved. Thus, the Waganda 
slay all the men and enslave the women and children; the 
Bali kill all the men; the Wakuafi enslave them; the 
Bechuana take no prisoners. On the whole, however, through 
savage and barbarian Africa, with the exception of the Kaffir 


»\ 1 ¢€.g. it is universal in Oregon (Waitz, 111. 345). Cf. Major Alvord, in 
Schoolcraft, v. 654, where an instance is given of a slave being sacrificed 
on his master’s death. 

2 Letourneau, L’Hsclavage, p. 35. According to the same authority 
(La Guerre, pp. 38, 39) head-hunting is common, and a woman’s skull is as 
valuable as a man’s. But women and girls are often spared in raids and 
taken for concubines. According to Kohler (Z. f. vgl. Rechtswissenschaft, 
1900, p. 364) slavery and a slave-trade occur in certain parts, and slaves 
are sometimes eaten. Adoption, however, is another possible alternative 
to cannibalism in some parts of Oceania, e.g. in New Caledonia, where 
slavery is unknown (Letourneau, La Guerre, p. 49). 

3 Schmidt, Z. f. V. R., 1898, p. 294. 

* Post, Afrik. Jurisprudenz, i. 85. 


246 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


tribes, slavery is universal and strongly developed, and its 
principal source of recruitment is war. Throughout the Malay 
world the enslavement of captives is found as an alternative to. 
cannibalism and head-hunting, while, again, in the tribes of the 
Asiatic Steppes the captives are often put to death, but slaves or 
serfs are numerous in proportion to the wealth and fighting 
power of the people who hold them. 

We may briefly summarize these characteristics of savage and 
barbaric war by saying that it is waged, not merely by tribe 
against tribe, but by individuals against individuals. Its motive 
is often vengeance, the slaying of a man or the kidnapping of 
a@ woman, and whether it ends in the extermination or the en- 
slavement of the beaten party, or even in the milder alternative 
of their adoption, it is equally directed against the individual 
persons who constitute the hostile community. The conquered 
in war stand with their persons and property wholly at the 
disposal of the victors. Their fate may be harsher or milder. 
They may be eaten, or sacrificed, or tortured, or simply slain 
where they stand; their lives may be spared, and they may 
be led into slavery. But in all these cases—and they form 
the overwhelming majority—they are treated as rightless and 
defenceless against those who conquer them. Even in the case 
where they are adopted as members of the conquering tribe, it 
can scarcely be said that their personal rights are taken into 
consideration. 


4. In early civilization the character of war is not fundament- 
ally changed in this respect. Only the growth of industry and 
of a settled order is a stimulus to the general enslavement of 
prisoners in preference to their destruction, while the develop- 
ment of military power increases the means of capture. Canni- 
balism generally dies out—the case of Mexico is an exception. 
Human sacrifice also occurs, but in the majority of instances, if 
the prisoners are not slain in pure vengeance, they are either 
carried off as slaves to the conqueror (and many of the great 
works of early civilization were built by slave labour of this kind) 
or a tribute is laid upon them, and they become a semi-servile 
population. | 

In ancient Egypt we find traces of cannibalism in the pyra- 
midal inscriptions, but they are not specially connected with 
warfare. Something of the nature of human sacrifice, however, 


1 For very divergent accounts of the Kaffirs both as to treatment of 
prisoners and as to the extent to which they recognized slavery, see Wait, 
i. 398; Letourneau, La Guerre, 96,97; d., L’Hsclavage, p. 53, ey. 


RELATIONS BETWEEN COMMUNITIES 247 


appears to have persisted to a late epoch. No bas relief is 
more familiar to the traveller in Egypt than that represent- 
“ing the king as a gigantic figure holding up a mace to smite 
the heads of a bunch of little captives, whom he holds with 
one hand, in the presence of a triad of gods. This scene, 
found among some of the very earliest of Egyptian monuments, 
recurs in the Middle and New Kingdoms. In some cases the 
bulk of the males were simply exterminated, but chiefs were 
selected, either for sacrifice or for special vengeance. Thothmes 
II. (18th Dynasty) records: “This army of his Majesty over- 
_ threw these foreigners. They took the life of every male accord- 
ing to all that his Majesty commanded, except that one of 
those children of the Prince of Kush was brought alive as a live 
prisoner, with his household, to his Majesty, and placed under 
the foot of the good god.’ Again, Amenhotep IT. (18th Dynasty) 
narrates how “ His Majesty returned in joy of heart to his father 
Amen. His hand had struck down the seven chiefs with his 
mace himself. ... They were hung up by the feet on the 
front of the bark of his Majesty. . . . The six of these enemies 
were hung in front of the walls of Thebes, and the hands in 
the same manner.”’? The hands in this passage refer to the 
method of enumerating the slain. Of those who were killed 
the hands were cut off and sent to the king as a voucher for the ~ 
number destroyed, and so the number of hands is a recognized 
expression for the number of slain warriors, and we have 
representations upon the monuments of heaps of hands of dead 
captives being brought in and piled before the triumphant 
king. 

On the other hand, many of the Egyptian warlike expeditions 
were apparently mere slave razzias. Thus, the officer Se’anch, 
who opened up Hammamat under the 11th Dynasty, records how 
he “ repaired to the sea and hunted people and hunted cattle, and 
I came to this region with sixty full-grown people and seventy 


1 Usurtesen (12th Dynasty) set up a stele commemorating his victories 
over the peoples beyond the Cataract. Ten of their principal chiefs had 
passed before Amon as prisoners, their arms tied behind their backs, and 
had been sacrificed at the foot of the altar by the sovereign himself. There 
are instances of human sacrifice as late as the Christian epoch (Amélineau, 
La Morale Hgyptienne, Introduction, p. 76). Amru, the Mohammedan con- 
queror of Egypt, forbade a young girl being thrown into the river to get 
a good inundation. This, of course, is not connected directly with warfare, 
but as prisoners had been the principal source of sacrifice to the gods 
in earlier times, the persistence of the idea of human sacrifice throws an 
ill-omened light upon their lot, even in later days. 

2 Flinders Petrie, History of Egypt, 17th and 18th Dynasties, p. 73. 

5 7b., 156. 


248 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


of their young children at a single time.” Similarly, Osurtesen 
IIT. (12th Dynasty) commemorates his victory over the Nubians : 
‘‘T have carried off their women and captured their men, for I 
marched to their well. I slew their oxen, cut down their corn 
and set fire.to it.” 1 

The appropriate god, of course, took a part with zest in these 
proceedings. ‘‘ The good god exults when he begins to fight; 
he is joyful when he is to cross the frontier, and is content when 
he sees blood; he cuts off the heads of his enemies, and an 
hour of fighting gives him more delight than a day of pleasure.”’ 
So say the inscriptions of the 19th Dynasty. Mercilessness is 
idealized. Eulogizing the king, Sinuhit says: “ He is a lion 
who strikes with the claw . . . he has a heart closed to pity; 
when he sees the multitudes he lets nothing remain behind 
him.” And Sinuhit himself, in narrating a single combat with 
his foe, expresses with admirable terseness the primitive theory 
of retaliation : ‘‘ I shot at him, and my arrow struck in his neck. 
He cried out and fell upon his nose. I brought down upon him 
his own battle-axe. ... Then I took his goods, I seized his 
cattle. What he had thought to do to me I did it unto him. 
I seized that which was in his tent; I spoiled his dwelling; 
I grew great thereby.” ? 

Thus the rightlessness of the captured enemy was complete. 
The ideas of vengeance and retaliation were practically unmiti- 
gated, and no softening influence was exerted by religion. Upon 
the other hand, the idea of a regular treaty with a foreign nation 
was distinctly understood. Thus we have, in the reign of 
Rameses II., a treaty with the Hittites, providing for the return 
of deserters from either country to their original home, and 
promising that neither the deserter himself nor his wives or 
children shall be destroyed, nor his mother be slain.® 

In the sister civilization of the Euphrates and Tigris Valleys 
more is known of the warlike methods of the relatively bar- 
barous Assyrians than of the relatively civilized Babylonians. 
Of the Babylonians our principal information comes from their 
treatment of the Jews, which included their arbitrary removal 
from their own land into a species of captivity, of the conditions 


1 Cf. the complacent account in the inscription of Uni (Sayce, Records 
of the Past (new series), vol. ii. p. 7). Sometimes the captives became 
the spoil of the general himself. Aahmes, in the beginning of the 18th 
Dynasty, gratefully acknowledges his Majesty’s goodness to him in this 
respect (Flinders Petrie, op. cit., p. 22; cf. Erman, 506). 

Sayce, op. ctt., vol. ii. p. 22. 

° The treaty, however, is now held to be more Hittite than Egyptian in 

origin. 


RELATIONS BETWEEN COMMUNITIES 249 


of which we know little, but, with the exception of the putting 
out of Zedekiah’s eyes, we hardly hear of the personal tortures 
so savagely boasted of by one after another of the Assyrian 
kings. ‘Towards the Babylonians the Assyrians themselves 
were mild in comparison with their treatment of other people; 
but the boasting of the Assyrian conquerors over the horrors 
perpetrated under their orders, though it appears in certain 
details to have been exaggerated by mistranslation, will 
probably always remain the classical exposition of naked and 
boastful ferocity in warfare. “To the city of Kinabu,” says 
_ Assur-nasir-pal (883-885 B.c.), ‘“ I approached. . . . I captured 
it. Six hundred of their fighting men I slew with the sword, 
3000 of their captives I burned with fire. . . . The people of 
the country of Nirbu encouraged one another . . . the city of 
Tela was very strong .. . 3000 of their fighting men I slew 
with the sword; their spoil, their goods, their oxen and their 
sheep I carried away; their numerous captives I burned with 
fire. I captured many of the soldiers alive with the hand. I 
cut off the hands and feet of some; I cut off the noses, the ears 
and the fingers of others; the eyes of the numerous soldiers 
I put out.” Again, in another city, “I impaled 700 men 
upon stakes at the approach of their great gate. The city I 
overthrew, dug up and reduced to a mound and ruin. Their 
young men and their maidens I burned as a holocaust.” ! 
And so on through a list of mutilations, burnings and 
impalements. 

Quarter, of course, was not always refused. Often the king 
narrates that the captives “ took my feet. Ilaid hold upon them 
and counted them among the men of my own country.” And 
it should be noted that, in the Assyrian Pantheon, there was at 
least one god who apparently made for righteousness and mercy. 
Asshur is always identified with the conquering king, who fights 
with Asshur, and wins victories for Asshur. But Shamash bestows 
his favours on the kings for righteousness, and it is at least 
worth noting that we find Tiglath-Pileser setting captives free 
in Shamash’s presence. The conquered might be carried off as 
slaves, or they might remain as tributaries, and the unwieldy 
and short-lived empires of the Near East consisted of such 
tributary states, frequently rebelling, and reduced by great 
barbarity to submission and the payment of further tribute. 
Probably the increased number of slaves in later, as compared 
with earlier Babylonian times, may be ascribed to a long course 
of successful warfare. 

1 Sayce, Records of the Past, ii. 145, 159, ete. 


250 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


5. The religious motive which, among the Assyrians and 
Egyptians, merely adds emphasis and a certain exaltation to 
warlike ferocity, became among the Hebrews a reason for carry- 
ing the savage practices of extermination to the extreme. We 
are perhaps hardly to assume that the primitive tribes who 
conquered Canaan were in reality so bloodthirsty as their 
historians represent them. The destruction, as commentators 
say, takes place on paper, but it is none the less ethically signifi- 
cant. ‘The rules of war are laid down in the twentieth chapter of 
Deuteronomy. A distinction is drawn between the cities which 
are far off and those of the Canaanites. In the former case the 
Hebrews were first to proclaim peace to the city to which they 
drew nigh, and “‘if it make thee answer of peace, and open unto 
thee, then it shall be that all the people that is found therein 
shall become tributary unto thee and shall serve thee.” This 
is the milder fate. But if it makes war and the Lord deliver it 
‘into thine hand, thou shalt smite every male thereof with the 
edge of the sword; but the women and the little ones, and the 
cattle, and all that is in the city, even all the spoil thereof, shalt 
thou take for a prey unto thyself.” This corresponds closely 
enough to what we have found to be the most common practice 
of barbarian warfare—tribute or forced labour from those who 
submit voluntarily, the massacre of the males and enslavement 
of women and children in other cases. A typical case is narrated, 
presumably as an example,’ in Numbers, where all the male 
Midianites are slain, but the women and children are taken; but 
Moses is wroth with the host for saving all the women alive, on 
the ground that they cause Israel to trespass, and he bids them 
kill every male among the little ones and every woman, except 
the virgins, whom they may keep for themselves. Here the 
fear of religious contamination comes in, and this is carried to 
an extreme in the case of the Canaanite cities with which we have 
now to deal. They were to be utterly destroyed. “‘ Of the 
cities of these peoples which the Lord thy God giveth thee for 
an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth.” 
And so, in the conquest.of Canaan, Jericho is “‘ devoted,” that is 
to say, it is made over absolutely to Jahveh; the city with every- — 
thing belonging to it is sacred, and so taboo to man, and a curse ~ 
is laid upon the site, so that it can never be built up again. When 
Achan secretes a wedge of gold taken from the spoil, he com- 
municates the curse to the whole host, and the people suffer 
defeat until they remove from them the accursed thing. In 
point of fact this religious extermination was, of course, very 


1 Num. xxxi. 8, 9. 


RELATIONS BETWEEN COMMUNITIES 251 


_ incomplete, for the Canaanites remained, and we find Solomon! 
levying a tribute of bond service upon them. But there was 
much savage barbarity, whether from religious motives or merely 
from revenge. Joab smote every male in Edom,? and when he 
took Rabbah, “he brought forth the people that were therein, 
and put them under saws, and under harrows of iron, and 
under axes of iron, and made them pass through the brick- 
kiln,? and thus did he unto all the cities of the children of 
Ammon.” 4 

Indiscriminate massacres were sometimes practised in the 
civil wars of the people, as in the case of the male Ephraimites 
who could not pronounce the famous shibboleth,® and of the 
Benjamites,* and the people of Jabesh-gilead who were de- 
stroyed, men, women and children, for not joining in the destruc- 
tion of the Benjamites.’? Only in two points does a higher ethical 
conception emerge. First, there is the provision for a female 
captive in Deuteronomy, referred to in a previous chapter. 
She was to have her time for mourning, and, if married by her 
captor, was not to be sold nor dealt with as a slave, ‘‘ because 
thou hast humbled her.’ Here there is a touch of humanity 
leavening general barbarism. Another point is the observance 
of the oath made to the children of Gibeon. They deceived 
Joshua into thinking they were strangers, but the covenant - 
with them was to be observed to the letter, and so they became 
hewers of wood and drawers of water unto all the congregation. 
The oath, that is to say, was inviolable though taken in covenant 
with a foreigner and a heathen. 

The spirit of retaliation and the taking of captives persists 
even in the post-exilic writer of Isaiah xili. and xiv.: “‘ They shall 
take them captive whose captives they were, and they shall 


1 | Kings ix. 20, 21. 2 1 Kings xi. 15. 

3 The Revised Version mercifully suggests a slight change in the text, 
which would run: ‘“‘ Made them labour at the brick mould ” (2 Sam. xii. 
31). 

4 1 Chronicles xx. 3. 5 Judges xii. 6. 

6 Judges xx. and xxi. 

7 The whole story of Judges xx. and xxi. is complex and probably 
derived by putting different and incompatible versions together. It is 
intended to represent an execution of justice for a wicked act upon a tribe, 
but it incidentally reveals the barbarities mentioned in the text. It is to 
be observed, however, that the Israelites shrink from the utter destruction 
of a tribe, and so they preserve four hundred virgins from the people 
of Jabesh-gilead as wives for the surviving Benjamites, whose women had 
been destroyed, while they further encourage the Benjamites to carry off 
maidens from the feast at Shiloh to make up for deficiencies, an inter- 
mingling of crude barbarisms with an attempt at a moral which could 
hardly be surpassed for confusion. 


252 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


rule over their oppressors.’’! Yet Micah is one of the first to 
dream of a universal peace. God “shall judge between many 
peoples, and shall reprove strong nations afar off, and they shall 
beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning- 
hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither 
shall they learn war any more.’ With this passage, which is 
repeated in almost the same terms in the post-exilic “ Isaiah,” we 
find the religion of the Jews turning its face away from the 
fierce exclusiveness which led merely to an idealization of the 
most savage elements of warfare towards those hopes of a world- 
embracing religion, which was destined to so mighty a growth, 
though the fruits of universal peace have not yet been borne. 


/6. So far we have dealt with the essentially warlike peoples. 
/As we go further east we come to that part of the human race 
‘in which the inherent preference of peace to war, professed by 
_other peoples, appears to be more of a reality. Both in Hindu 
and in Chinese ethics, widely different as they are in other 
| respects, war takes a lower place than in Western civilization. 
. India, of course, had its heroic age. War is frequently mentioned 
in the Vedas. War chariots were used, and spears, swords, 
knives and defensive armour. Probably the Aryan invaders of 
India did not differ much in the rules of warfare from their 
kindred in other parts of the world. In the Mahabharata 
we find the fighting spirit idealized. Chivalry is recognized, 
and honourable and dishonourable methods of warfare are 
distinguished. 


** Red with rage, Bhima stepped up to the Kinga who lay 
outstretched, with his club beside him, beat in his skull with his 
foot, and said - ‘We have not laid fire to burn our enemies, nor 
cheated them in the game, nor outraged their wives; by the 
strength of our arms alone we destroy our enemies.’ ” 2 


The victors, however, carry off slave-women along with the 
booty; so that, though there might be rules of chivalry in the 
fight, the prisoners, as in barbaric warfare, were at the disposal 
of the conqueror. But not at his absolute disposal; quarter for 
the vanquished and general respect for women, though they 
appear to have been lawfully part of the spoil, are strongly 
insisted upon. Manu has, in fact, a complete, though brief, 
legal code of warfare. 


When he fights with his foes in battle, let him not strike with 
weapons concealed (in wood), nor with (such as are) barbed, 


1 Isaiah xiv. 2. 2 Duncker, History of Antiquity, vol. iv. p. 93. 


RELATIONS BETWEEN COMMUNITIES 253 


poisoned, or the points of which are blazing with fire. Let him 
not strike one who (in flight) has climbed on an eminence, nor a 
eunuch, nor one who joins the palms of his hands (in supplica- 
tion), nor one who (flees) with flying hair, nor one who sits down, 
nor one who says, “I am thine.’ Nor one who sleeps, nor one 
who has lost his coat of mail, nor one who is naked, nor one who 
is disarmed, nor one who looks on without taking part in the 
fight, nor one who is fighting with another (foe). Nor one whose 
weapons are broken, nor one afflicted (with sorrow), nor one who 
has been grievously wounded, nor one who is in fear, nor one who 
has turned to fiight; (but in all these cases let him) remember 
the duty (of honourable warriors).! 


This recognition of chivalrous usage and limitation of the 
use of barbarous methods may be associated with that general 
tendency of Indian thought which put the priestly caste above 
the warrior. Purity of life is the first object, and the spiritual 
law, involving, as it does at its best, careful abstinence from 
injury to every living creature, man or beast, becomes an ideal 
of life which, in the Brahmanic teaching, ranks above the old 
_ knightly ideal.2 This ideal of peace and universal beneficence 
was further emphasized by Buddhism, to which the taking of 
human life under any conditions is a crime. 

Passing still further east, we find that Chinese thinkers, so 
different from Indian in other respects, agree with them in their 
attitude to warfare. Yet Chinese warfare itself was, at any rate 
in early times, thoroughly barbaric. Few prisoners were made ; 
the vanquished chiefs were put to death, while the common 
soldiers were released after an ear had been cut off. The left 
ears of the slain were also cut off, no doubt for purposes of 
reckoning.? Captives, however, were at times made slaves and 
were also tortured. We find allusions to both these practices in 
the classical books, e.g. in the She-King— 


‘‘ With our prisoners for the question and our captive crowd we return.” * 
Again— 


** My sorrowing heart is very sad, 
I think of my unfortunate position. 
The innocent people will all be reduced to servitude with me.” ® 





1 Manu, vii. sec. 90—93. 2 Duncker, op. ctt., 107. 

3 Biot, in the Journal Asiatique, translated in Legge’s Prolegomena to 
the She-King, chap. iv. p. 158. 

4 She-King, Part II. Book I. Ode 8, Stanza 6. On this Dr. Legge notes : 
*‘ Those who would be questioned ”’ (put to the torture) “indicate, we may 
suppose, chiefs of the Heen-yun; the ‘ crowd of captives,’ the multitude of 
their followers.” 

5 Part II. Book IV. Ode 8, Stanza 3. 








254 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


And again— 


‘* The engines of onfall and assault were gently applied 
Against the walls of Ts’ung, high and great. 
Captives for the question were brought in one after another. 
The left ears (of the slain) were taken leisurely.” } 


The classical books, however, more than once represent the 
superiority of peaceful to warlike methods. The emperor or 
prince who gives an example of justice and graciousness is re- 
presented as attracting the people to him, and warlike chiefs are 
depicted as being influenced by an example of goodwill and 
readiness to give up a point. This is brought out very quaintly 
in such stories as those of the chiefs of Joo and Juy, who had a 
quarrel about a strip of territory, which they went to lay before 
the lord of Chow. But “as soon as they entered his territory, 
they saw the ploughers readily yielding the furrow, and travellers 
yielding the path, to one another”’; and in fact every one giving 
way to every one else. All this made them ashamed of their 
own quarrel. They became reunited, and the affair being noised 
abroad, more than forty states tendered their submission to 
Chow.? But in this glorification of the virtues of an excellent 
passivity and of conquering by the meek surrender of claims, we 
come perilously near to a thin excuse for mere cowardice or 
failure. The reader must judge in which way the following 
story may be interpreted. When the Emperor Yu could not 
conquer the rebels of Meaou, he was admonished by Yih that 
‘pride brings loss, and humility receives increase.’ Moved by 
the “‘ excellent words,” he drew off his army and “set about 
diffusing his accomplishments and virtue more widely.” The 
better part of valour had its reward. ‘In seventy days the 
Prince of Meaou came to make his submission.” One would 
like to know the precise nature of the “‘ submission.” 3 

In the teaching of Mencius, however, there is no doubt at all 
about the strenuous opposition to war and militarism. The 
protests of this great teacher against the use of force were 
repeated and strenuous. They were based upon the purest of 
humanitarian principles and applied with great psychological 
insight. When Mencius saw King Seuen much touched by the 
frightened appearance of an ox being led to the sacrifice and 
ordering that a sheep should be substituted for it, he told him 


1 Part III. Book I. Ode 7, Stanza 8. On this Dr. Legge notes: “* When 
prisoners refused to submit, they were put to death and their left ears 
taken off.” 

2 She-King, vol. ii. p. 441, note. 

3 Shoo-King, part ii. book ii., iii. 21. 


RELATIONS BETWEEN COMMUNITIES 255 


_very justly that it was because “ you saw the oxen and had not 
seen the sheep.”’ A superior man, he went on, cannot eat the 
animals whose dying cries he has heard, and so he keeps away 
from his cook-room. Mencius had thus grasped the fundamental 
fact of the part played by want of imagination in maintaining 
warfare. He proceeds to point out that here “is kindness 
sufficient to reach to animals, and no benefits are extended from 
it to the people.’ The king should begin, he says, with rever- 
ence to age and kindness to youth in his own family, and the 
example would spread and tend to humanize the people. In- 
stead of doing this the king prepares for war. Does this give 
him pleasure? The king admits that it does not, but says he 
does it to “seek for what I greatly desire.” Mencius asks for 
what reason he desires it—for lack of food, clothing or sounds ? 
No; it is for none of these. ‘“‘ You wish to enlarge your 
territories . . . to rule the middle kingdom and to attract to 
you the barbarous tribes that surround it, but to do what you do 
to seek for what you desire is like climbing a tree to seek for 
fish.’ In fact, it is worse, for it is calamitous. ‘‘ Now, if your 
Majesty will institute a government whose action should all 
be benevolent, this would cause all the officers in the empire to 
wish to stand in your Majesty’s court, and the farmers all to 
wish to plough in your Majesty’s fields, and the merchants both 
travelling and stationary, all to wish to store their goods in your 
Majesty’s market-places . . . and all throughout the empire 
who feel aggrieved by their rulers to wish to come and complain 
to your Majesty.” In short, Mencius’ prescription for making 
one’s self a universal monarch was to prove one’s self the best 
and most just monarch.2, He would disallow the annexation of 
conquered territory except by the will of the conquered people. 
When King Seuen had conquered Yen, he asked Mencius if he 
should take possession of it. Mencius replied that, if the people 
of Yen would be pleased with his doing so, let him do it; other- 
wise not.2 War itself Mencius denounces as a crime, and those 
who make war as worthy of death and worse. Confucius, he said, 
would have nothing to do with the ministers of oppressive 
princes; “how much more would he have rejected those who 
are vehement to fight for their prince. When contentions about 
territory are the ground on which they fight, they slaughter 
men until the fields are filled with them .. . this is what is 
called leading on the land to devour human flesh.”” Death, he 
says, is not enough for such a crime, and those who are skilful to 


1 Mencius, Book I. part i. chap. vii. par. 8-10. 
2 Book I. part i. chap. vii. 8 Book I. part ii. chap x. 


is 


256 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


fight should suffer the highest punishment. Again, “ to employ 
an uninstructed people in war may be said to be destroying the 
people. . . . Though by a single battle you should subdue Tse 
and get possession of Nan-yan, the thing ought not to be done.” 4 
The mere transfer of territory is wrong, but the bloodshed by 
which it is achievedis worse. “‘ [fit were merely taking the place 
from the one state to give it to the other, a benevolent man 
would not do it; how much less will he do so when the end 
is to be sought by the slaughter of men.” As to ministers who 
advise a warlike policy with a view to conquest, they might be 
tolerated in these degenerate days, but in the good old times 
they would have been called robbers of the people. Mencius 
said: ‘Those who nowadays serve their sovereigns, say, 
‘We can for our sovereign enlarge the limits of the cultivated 
ground and fill his treasuries and arsenals.’ Such persons are 
nowadays called ‘Good Ministers,’ but anciently they were 
called ‘Robbers of the People.’’’? The generals Mencius 
involved in one condemnation with the warlike ministers. 
“There are men who say, ‘I am skilful at marshalling troops; 
Iam skilful at conducting a battle.’ They are great criminals.” 4 
The warlike Western world has scarcely known a more vigorous 
and sweeping protest against warfare and everything connected 
with it and every principle upon which it is based. And if it is 
said that the Chinese Empire, under the inspiration of such 
teaching, has ceased to be able adequately to defend itself 
against barbarians, it should also be remembered that, under the 
Chinese system, a population larger than that of Europe live in 
permanent peace with one another, and that they have, in a 
sense, as their own religious books recommend, absorbed those 
who have conquered them by peaceful arts. 


/ 7. From these ideals of peace we return to the fighting nations 
of the Western world. In Homeric Greece wars were often 
little more than raids for women and cattle lifting, or they were 
reprisals for similar raids by a hostile clan. Piracy was held to 
be improper and displeasing to the gods, but not shameful, and 
Thucydides remarks that to ask a stranger whether he was a 
pirate was apparently not considered an act of discourtesy.5 In 
a captured town the normal fate of the men was to be slain, and 
of the women to be carried off as bond slaves. Achilles boasts 
of the pillage of which he has been guilty.6 Quarter may be 


1 Book IV. part i. chap. xiv.; Book VI. part ii. chap. viii. J 
2 1b., sec. 8. ; 3 Book VI. part i. chap. ix. 
* Book VII. part ii. chap. iv. 5 Thucyd., i. 5. 


§ Iliad, IX. 325, ete. 


RELATIONS BETWEEN COMMUNITIES 257 


refused at will. Before the death of Patroclus Achilles often 
accepted ransom, but after it he declares his intention of refusing 
all quarter and rejects Lycaon’s prayers for his life. The corpse 
of the dead is insulted ; Hector is dragged at the chariot wheels, 
and twelve youths are sacrificed to the spirit of Patroclus. Even 
in the historical period prisoners of war were unconditionally 
the property of the conqueror.1. Custom enjoined quarter,? but 
prisoners were often killed.2 Generally prisoners were held for 
exchange or ransom,‘ or sold as slaves. The booty was divided, 
and a tithe was given to the gods. In the case of the Medising 
cities the patriot Greeks took oath to devote a tithe of their goods 
to Delphi. But generally the terms obtained by a surrendered 
city depended upon the Homologia.» When a town was stormed 
all the males were often put to the sword and the women and 
children enslaved. At the capture of Platza the Spartans put 
all the prisoners to death after a judicial trial, and the Athenians 
were no better. On the suppression of the revolt of Chios all the 
men were slain and the women and children enslaved. The same 
fate befell Melos,’? while at Mende the generals intervened to 
prevent the massacre. At times the dead were mutilated,® and 
the same fate might even befall the living.1° The massacres did 
not always go without a protest. In the famous case of Mitylene, 
the destruction of the entire city, after having been voted by the 
assembly, was rescinded by the redoubled efforts of the friends 
of the Mityleneans, who, by the aid of a specially swift trireme, 
overtook the first order in time to prevent its execution, so that 
only 1000 Mityleneans were put to death. 

/ On the other hand, the Greeks were perhaps the first people 
to develop something like a regular international law. Feuds 
between neighbours were replaced by spondw, which passed 
ultimately into alliances, generally of a defensive character, and 


1 Busolt, Handbuch der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft, Bd. iv. p. 59. 
Aristotle, Politics, i i. 2-6, 1255a. 

2 Thucyd, iii. 58, 66, 67. The surrendered Plateans plead that “ the 
custom of Hellas does not allow the suppliant to be put to death.” The 
plea, however, was not allowed. 

$ Thucyd., i. 30; ii. 67; iii. a Xenophon, Hellenics, I. i. 32. Plutarch, 
Lysander Fie, Langhorne), p. 311. 

j* Thucyd., ii. 103; iv. 89; v. 3. Herodt., i. 89. 

- 5 Tn the case of Potidea, "the men were allowed to leave the city with 
one garment, the women with two. The Athenians blamed the general 
‘for concluding the agreement instead of forcing a surrender at discretion 
(Thucyd., ii. 70). 

; Thad, IX. 590. Thucyd., iii. 28; v. 3, 32, 116. 

; Thucyd., v. 116. $ Th hucyd., iv. 130. 

x, Xenophon, Anabasis, iii. 4. 

} oe “sea Hellenics, ii. 1. 


—- 9° Soe 


258 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


for a specified number of years.1 But, further than this, they 
developed a regular system of arbitration. Periander of Corinth 
arbitrated between Athens and Mitylene as to the possession of 
Sigeum. In the sixth century Sparta arbitrated between Athens 
and Megara, and appeals to Delphi were not uncommon.?_ Some- 
times states were pledged by oath or by the deposit of a sum 
of money to abide by arbitration, but in other cases the loyal 
acceptance of the decision was a matter of goodwill, and was 
sometimes refused, as in the case of Thebes ® and of Elis.4 
/ Furthermore, the instances of severity quoted above represent 
{the darkest side of Greek warfare. There was a better spirit 
\ at work which recognized certain common laws of the Hellenes, 

‘unwritten laws ”’ prescribing a measure of justice in inter-state 
dealings, and of moderation and humanity to the vanquished. 
The conquered Platzans appeal, though they appeal in vain, 
to the custom of Hellas, which does not allow suppliants to be 
put to death. The dealings of the Athenians with Melos are 
scathingly exposed by Thucydides by the absolute contempt of 
right which he puts into the mouths of the apologists for Athens, 
and the incident is dramatically set immediately before the 
narrative of the Syracusan expedition, in which the impieties of 
Athenian aggression were heavily punished. Mr. Murray con- 
siders that the same incident was the immediate occasion of 
Euripides’ moving representation of the sufferings of the “ Trojan 
Women” played in the following year. Further, the whole 
principle of Greek warfare was challenged by the philosophers. 
The enslavement of Greek prisoners, the stripping of the slain, 
the erection of trophies in temples, the ravaging of the land 
(apart from carrying off the crop of the season) and the burning 
of houses are all condemned by Plato. The refusal of quarter is 
not explicitly mentioned, from which we may infer that at least 
as a matter of principle this was sufficiently recognized as a 
wrong in the fourth century. On the other hand, this milder 
practice is only insisted on in wars between Greek and Greek. 
These should be conducted as civil strife is at present—that is to 
say, with the mitigations specified, while in future, Greeks should 
behave to barbarians as they now do to one another. Nor was 
Plato alone in his attitude. Aristotle, while recording that the 
law ‘‘is an agreement wherein they say that what is conquered in 

' Busolt, op. cit., p. 54. 2 Thucyd., 1. 28. 3 Herodt., vi. 108. 

‘ Thucyd., v. 31. 5 Thueyd., iii. 58. 

6 Observe, however, that this summary of the argument is put into the 
mouth of Glaucon, not of Socrates. Possibly Plato would have been 


willing to preach a more comprehensive humanity, but feared to push the 
argument too far (Republic, v. 469-471). 


RELATIONS BETWEEN COMMUNITIES 259 


war is the property of the conqueror,” records that many jurists 
bring a charge as it were of illegality against this law, and both 
jurists and philosophers are divided on the point.1 Aristotle 
himself points out that the origin of a war may not be just, and 
“no one would say that he is a slave who does not deserve to be 
a Slave, for if so those who are held noblest might be slaves and 
sons of slaves if they happened to be captured and sold.” The 
truth is that the Greeks ‘‘ do not mean to call themselves slaves, 
but the barbarians.” The solution is that there are natural 
slaves, who are slaves everywhere. In other words, the bar- 
barian is ordained by nature as slave to the Hellene, but the 
Hellenes should be free.2 In this argument Aristotle clearly 
conceives himself to be merely stating explicitly and consistently 
the principle which is confusedly held in the uninstructed thought 
of the period. He thus represents the stage which the best 
Greek ethics really attained in this direction—an acceptance of a 
higher rule of warfare enjoining respect for the persons of the 
conquered (Plato’s argument would add for their property as well) 
within the limits of Hellas.* Outside these limits the old rules 
of barbaric warfare persist unaltered. 
/f At Rome a defeated enemy was in principle rightless. The 
very type and exemplar of property is that which is captured 
from anenemy. Stranger and enemy are identical terms. The 
stranger can have no rights except through the protection of a 
citizen, and even apart from war and hostility it is a juristic 
maxim that a member of a foreign community not bound to 
Rome by any treaty might be lawfully enslaved ; in other words, 
all legal rights are confined to citizens and those to whom their 
protection is extended, and the alien, and therefore still more the 
captured foeman, is at the disposal ofthe conqueror. In point of 
fact the conquered were often put to death in great numbers, for 
example, the population of Vacca by Metellus in the Jugurthine 
war. The same fate befell many towns of Gaul under the com- 
paratively clement Julius Cesar. The taking of Ilurgis in Spain 
‘was succeeded by a general massacre in which neither women nor 
‘shildren were spared.> Tacitus, describing the ravaging of the 
‘Marsi by Germanicus, says that neither sex nor age were grounds 
1 rodT0 8} 7d Sixarov woAAo) TaY ev Tots véuoLs SomeEp phropa ypdpovTat Tapaydpuwov 
i i Tos pmey oUTw SoKxel Tors 3S éxeivws, kal trav copay (Aristotle, Politics, 
ley V1. . 

"2 Bie a. 4-6. 

% The principle found practical expression in the oath of the Delphian 
«Amphictyony not to destroy any allied state, nor to cut off its water in war 
w peace (Busolt, p. 65). 


 * Letourneau, La Guerre, p. 466. 
_ ® Grotius, iii. 4, 9, quoting Appian. 





= 


260: MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


of mercy.!. The good Emperor Titus massacred or sold as slaves 
all the captives at the taking of Jerusalem.? 

But these are extreme cases. There is no reason to doubt 
that the general feeling of the Roman world condemned excesses 
of barbarity. Livy makes Camillus say that his soldiers direct 
their arms not against that age which is spared even in the 
capture of a town, but against armed men? The slaughter of 
non-combatants, old men, women and children, is frequently 
spoken of in terms of condemnation, even of horror,* and Livy's 
words, ‘‘ jure belli in armatos repugnantesque cedes,”’ ° imply 
the full limitation of the right of killing to active combatants 
asx understood in modern warfare. The violation of women, if 
frequently allowed, was as frequently condemned, and measures 
were by some generals taken to prevent it.6 Upon the whole, 
personal barbarity, indiscriminate massacre, the refusal of 
quarter, the violation of women, and the slaying of captives, 
though practised in times of excitement or loose discipline, are 
condemned by the better minds as contrary to the jus bell.? 
On the other hand, the enslavement of prisoners, if desired, and 
the confiscation of property were admitted to be regular.® 

/The importation of slaves into Italy on a large scale, owing to 
war and the slave trade, revolutionized the Roman economic 
system, and led thereby to the fall of the Republic. But, 
‘instead of being enslaved, the conquered people might become 
‘tributary—dediticiit. The formula in this case expresses the 
absoluteness of surrender exacted by an ancient conqueror: “I 
give my person, my town, my land, the water which runs there, 
my boundary gods, my temples, my movables, all the things 


1 Grotius, iii. chap. iv. section 9, and authorities there cited, especially 
the cynical remark of Horace which sums up the whole matter: “ Vendere 
cum possis captivum occidere noli”’ (Ep. xvi. 69). : 

2 Letourneau, La Guerre, p. 467, quoting Josephus, Bell. Jud., Book VI. 
chap. xlv. 

3 Livy, v. 27, and other passages quoted in Grotius, iii. 11. 

4 Instances, Greek and Latin, in Grotius, loc. cit. 

5 Livy, xxviii. 23. Grotius, 7b. Grotius further cites Sallust (Jugur- 
thine War, chap. xcvi.) for a condemnation of the slaughter of men after 
surrender as contra jus belli. Elsewhere (par. 6) he quotes Cicero as saying 
that captives who have not shown cruelty should be spared, and Seneca, as 
insisting that an enemy should be set free, and even held in honour, if he 
has fought for honourable reasons. 

6 e.g. Marcellus and Scipio. Grotius, Book III. chap. iv. par. 19. 

7 An exception must be admitted in the case of the vanquished king or 
general, who might be, and not infrequently was, put to death in the 
Mamertine prison before the sacrifice to Capitoline Jupiter was proceeded 
with (Grotius, ili. 11, 1). 

8 See Livy, cited in Grotius, iii. 5, 1: ‘‘ Esse quadam belli jura que 
ut facere ita pati sit fas: sata exuri, dirui tecta: predas hominum 
pecorumque agi.” 


RELATIONS BETWEEN COMMUNITIES 261 


which belong to the gods, to the Roman people.”’! The people 
who surrendered on these terms retained their lands on payment 
of tribute and accepted a Roman governor. They had in 
strictness no rights as against the Roman Government, and 
whatever liberties were accorded to them were reversible at will.” 
But a more liberal system grew up as the Roman conquests were 
extended. In some cases a community was allowed to retain 
its own government while brought under the political hegemony 
of Rome as an ally, with rights secured by foeedus. <A consider- 
able measure of local self-government was left to the civilized 
communities fully incorporated in the Empire, and the spread 
of Roman civilization was regularly marked by the extension of 
municipal privileges. Further, civic rights were extended to 
the subjects of Rome, first in the form of the jus Latinum, which 
from early days had conferred the principal civil rights on in- 
habitants of the cities of Latium, and finally, as civilized order 
advanced, of the full Roman franchise, which, though its political 
value disappeared. with the fall of the Republic, placed subjects 
and masters on equal terms before the law. The boast of Virgil 
that Rome spared the submissive and warred down the proud 
was not wholly without justification, and the Roman Empire 
radually approached the ideal of a world state, in which dis- 
inctions of nationality carried no difference of privilege, but 
itizenship was extended to all free men. There was in this a 
ertain approach to universalism which might hold within it 
ome promise, if not of an abolition of war, at any rate of a 
econstitution of its character. 


8. We have now to consider the bearing of universalism, as 
represented by the world religions, upon the moralities of war. 
In the teaching of the Koran it appears to be assumed that 
true believers will live at peace, while they will conquer and 
subdue the unbeliever. ‘If the two parties of believers quarrel, 
then make peace between them; and if one of the twain outrages 
the other, then fight the party that has committed the outrage 
until it return to God’s bidding; and if it do return, then make 
peace between them with equity and be just. Verily God loves 
the just. The believers are but brothers, so make peace between 
your two brethren and fear God, haply ye may obtain mercy.” § 
No Moslem captive might be enslaved.4 Very different was the 


1 Letourneau, p. 468. 

* Mommsen, Hist. of Rome, Book IV. chap. vii. 

* Koran, Sacred Books of the Hast, vol. ix. chap. xlix. 
Grotius, ili. 7, ix. 2. 


— — 


262 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


attitude to unbelievers. “And when ye meet those who mis- 
believe, then striking off heads until ye have massacred them, 
and bind fast the bonds.’’ Theoretically, in fact, there is per- 
petual war with all countries which have not embraced Islam. 
But there are degrees. No compromise was possible with 
Arabian idolaters or with apostates. Non-Arabian idolaters 
might be reduced to slavery, and, generally speaking, captives 
might be slain, since the Prophet did so, and slaying them 
terminates wickedness, but if a captive became a Moslem on the 
battlefield, he might not be put to death, but in this case he might 
still be enslaved, as the reason for enslaving him, that is to say, 
securing his person, came into operation before the change of 
faith. Slavery, then, was the second alternative, and beyond 
/ this there was the milder possibility that the captive might be 
~ released as a Zimmi—that is to say, as a non-Moslem subject, 


_~liable to tribute. In any case a woman was not to be slain in 


war. Mohammedan teaching, then, rests on the distinction 
~ between Moslem and non-Moslem. Within the Moslem world it 
looks forward to universal peace and forbids the enslavement of 
the captive. Outside that world it allows not only enslavement, 
but the refusal of quarter. 

The character and effects of Christian teaching are somewhat 
complex. While the Gospels pronounced definitely against 
violence in any shape or form, the Church accommodated her 
teaching to the practice of a warlike age, and Augustine up- 
holds the soldier’s profession, and endeavours to lay down the 
conditions upon which war is justified. ‘To wage war is not a 
crime, but to wage war for the sake of booty.” 1 There is no 
moral distinction between open fighting and ambuscade in a 
just war, ‘‘ but just wars are commonly defined as those which 
avenge injuries, if any race or state which is to be attacked in 
war has either neglected to punish wrongs done by its own 
citizens or to retrieve what has been wrongfully carried off.” ” 
Again, the kind of war ordained by God is just. Ambrose, 
strongly denouncing the principle of non-resistance, declares 
that he who does not defend a friend is as bad as the aggressor." 
On the other hand, malice, cruelty and vengeance, the implac- 
able spirit, savagery in insurrection (feritas rebellandi) and the 
lust of dominion are condemned by Augustine.t The purport 


of these distinctions, for what they are worth, is to condemn 
1 Serm. xix. Quoted by Gratian, Corpus Juris, 893, but apparently of 


doubtful authenticity. 
* Corpus Juris, 894. Reading “ si qua gens vel civitas que bello petenda 


3 ib., 898. Contra Manicheos, Corpus Juris, 892. 


RELATIONS BETWEEN COMMUNITIES 263 


ageression and restrict warfare to the defensive. Private war- 
fare, moreover, was persistently combated by the Church,! and 
with regard to the rules of warfare generally, the canons dealing 
with the treatment of the enemy in person or property mark a 
distinct advance in European custom. To enslave a fellow- 
Christian or to put him to death, except in the actual fighting, 
was forbidden from an early date,? and Augustine lays down, 
though not in very forcible language, the broad principle of later 
warfare, that the slaughter of the enemy is to be limited by 
ecessity (hostem pugnantem necessitas deprimat non voluntas). 8 
rom this it follows that the lives of non-combatants, as well as 
aptives, should be spared. Women and children are therefore 
secured from violence. Priests naturally enjoyed the same 
rivilege, and it was extended by the Canon Law to husband- 
men and tradesmen.* Even as to the practice of ransom, which 
grew up when quarter came to be allowed, the Canon Law had 
its doubts, to be overcome by a lawyer’s quibble. ‘“‘ A captive’s 
goods are unjustly extorted from him, but are justly proffered 
to redeem his life,” is the solution proposed by Gratian;® a 
solution which in practice justifies ransom, and in theory must 
be taken to admit that the captive’s life is forfeit. 

How far these relatively enlightened principles were from 
restraining the barbarity of the Middle Ages every one knows. 
From the decline of the Western Empire to the Peace of West- 
phalia the internal wars of Western Europe present a series of 
barbarities and horrors which fully equal those of the Greek 
or the Italian peoples, and Grotius, in his search for instances 
of magnanimity, generosity and the reprobation of methods of 
Savagery, more often quotes Greek or Roman generals than 
those of the Middle Ages or of his own time. Yet the idea of 


1 According to Westermarck, however, with comparatively little success 
(Moral Ideas, p. 356 seq.). 

2 Grotius, loc. cit., quoting Gregoras, who lays it down as a rule holding 
among Christians, d:a thy Tis wictews TavToTHTa, recognized not only among 
_ Romans and Thessalonians, but among Illyrians, Triballi, and Bulgarians, 
To pev mpdywata wdva oKvdevery Ta SE THuaTa uy avdpamodiCeaOa, unde povedery 
éiw Ths moAcuiKHs wmapatatews undéeva. 

3 Augustine, Ep. 207. C. J., 892. 

* Grotius, iii. 11, 12. Hall (A Treatise on International Law, p. 397) 
refers to the Canon de Treuga (Decret. Greg., p. 203, lib. i., Tit. xxxiv. 
cap. 2), which laid down that monks, merchants, husbandmen and their 
animals, travellers, etc., are not to be killed. Hall also cites Franciscus 4 
Victoria as maintaining ‘‘ quod etiam in bello contra Turcos non licet inter- 
ficere infantes. Imo nec feminas inter infideles.’’ The tradition lingered 
long that a garrison which held out a Voutrance might Jawfully be massacred. 
This is discussed by Grotius, iii. 11, 16, ete. See Hall, 400. 

> Grat., Corpus Juris, 896. 


264 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


chivalry—the cult of the very parfait gentil knight, sworn to 
succour the oppressed, to defend the women and children, and 
to avoid all unknightly deeds—is a true product of the Middle 
Ages, and its appearance side by side with the barbarities of 
actual warfare is characteristic of the period. In the genera- 
tions before Grotius’ own time and during his life the savagery 
of warfare had gathered itself for a supreme effort, and under 
the guiding genius of an Alva and a Tilly had shown what men 
could do to one another. But with the Peace of Westphalia 
the period of the religious wars came to an end. Men were 
sickened with horrors, and were the more ready to listen to 
those who, like Grotius, had a rule to propound whereby even 
in war men might be saved from becoming fiends. The devas- 
tation of the Palatinate, which half-a-century earlier would 
‘have passed unnoticed as an ordinary incident of war, coming 
in 1689, caused a thrill of horror in Europe, and from that time 
_ onwards the practice of war underwent a slow and insufficient, 
' but still a real amendment. 
9. The principle to which Grotius appealed was the Law of 
Nature, which, however fictitious in the form in which it was 
‘conceived by him and his contemporaries, expressed the pro- 
found ethical truth that the rights and duties of men are not 
circumscribed by the limitations of positive law or of revelation, 
but rest upon certain universal attributes of humanity. But 
this principle was pregnant with great consequences. By rest- 
ing rights and duties on human nature as such, it gets below 
the distinction of compatriot and foreigner and destroys the 
basis of group-morality. Once grant that an enemy does not 
cease to be a man, to whom as a man certain primary duties 
are owing, and we have a principle which undermines the whole 
structure of the earlier ethics of warfare. As a human being 
possessed of human rights, the enemy comes under the ordinary 
civilized conceptions of justice. He cannot fairly be punished 
for the delinquencies of hisnation. Grant, what every belligerent 
assumes, that his own cause is just and that of the opponent 
indefensible, grant that this is proved to the full satisfaction of 
the military conscience by the verdict of the god of battles, still 
it is only the hostile government that is in fault. The citizen 
of the conquered country, even the soldier of the beaten army, 
is not in fault. He has merely done his duty as a patriot, and 
to make him suffer either in person or property for the delin- 
quencies of his government would be to apply the barbaric 
principle of collective responsibility. The custom of nations, 


RELATIONS BETWEEN COMMUNITIES 265 


and in recent times explicit Conventions, especially the Geneva 
Convention of 1864 and the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 
1907,1 have built up an extensive theoretical code for the pro- 
tection of individuals. The employment of poison, killing by 
treachery, the refusal of quarter, the use of weapons “‘ of a nature 
to cause superfluous injury, to compel people to serve against 
heir own country and to destroy or seize property unless it 
“be imperatively demanded by the necessities of war,’ are 
hings forbidden by the Hague Convention of 1907, art. 23. The 
bombardment of undefended places is forbidden by art. 25, 
pillage by arts. 28 and 47, collective penalties, pecuniary or 
other, for the acts of individuals by art. 50. Art. 46 stipulates 
that “Family honour and rights, the lives of individuals and 
private property, as well as religious convictions and liberty of 
worship, must be respected. Private property cannot be con- 
fiscated,’”’ money and requisitions in kind can only be levied for 
purposes of administration or for military necessities (arts. 48 
and 52). ‘The treatment of prisoners and the wounded is elabor- 
ately safeguarded. If much of this reads like a satire on the 
le of modern warfare it is due to two causes. In the 

rst place, there is no authority whatever but the goodwill of 
the authorities or the fear of reprisals? to enforce the code. Inthe 
second place, military necessity is a cloak covering a multitude of 
sins. Thus, itisillegal to destroy private property, but military 
necessity may require and justify the devastation of an entire 
country.* In practice it is to be feared that modern war inflicts 
no less suffering on the general population while it lasts than 
the warfare of old days. But this is not a question which 
can be judged in a dry light in the autumn of 1914. In ethical 
theory, and in the customs which it has codified, the civilized 
world has sought to safeguard the obligations of humanity 
and the rights of the person. Though the citizens of a hostile 
state are enemies war is not waged indiscriminately upon 
individuals, but is “a contention of states * through their armed 


1 See The Hague Peace Conference, by A. P. Higgins, IV., “‘ The Laws and 
Customs of War on Land.” 

* Reprisals on innocent persons are not forbidden and the Hague Con- 
ventions are silent about hostages. But the practice of executing innocent 
men in cold blood for the misdeeds of others is one of the most hideous 
practices of modern war and goes far to deprive non-combatants of their 
security. On Reprisals, see Oppenheim, Internat. Law, vol. ii. p. 305, and 
on Hostages, p. 317, etc. 

3 Oppenhein, vol. ii. p. 190. 

* Oppenheim, ii. 63. The doctrine of Rousseau, that war is a relation 
between states and not between individuals, goes a step further, and is 
largely accepted on the Continent. British and American writers regard 


266 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


forces,’ 1 and neither its progress nor its victorious close is to 
deprive the vanquished of those rights which civilized codes 
accept as inherent in human beings. 


10. In emancipating individual rights from the violence of 
war, the international lawyers were merely applying the concep- 
tion of the rights of the individual personality on which modern 
ethics rest. The further question remained, whether the various 
groups of mankind have as groups assignable rights. Has a 
state rights as against other states ? Has a nationality which has 
no independent government a right as against the state or empire 
of which it forms a part? Has a locality rights as against the 
country within which it lies ? Confining ourselves for the present 
to the first question, we may point out that the utter denial of 
all obligations as between communities under separate govern- 
ments has seldom, if ever, been consistently carried out. Even 
savages recognize the obligations of good faith, and the wicked- 
ness of breaking a covenant when once made. On the other 
hand, the right of the stronger to impose what terms he pleases, 
and if necessary to push his demands to the point of the utter 
annihilation of his enemy as an independent power, has been 
almost as generally admitted. Yet in its denial of international 
justice the world has always been singularly halting. The fable 
of the wolf and the lamb has always applied to the dealings of 
strong and weak peoples, and men are never content to destroy 
their enemies without first proving them to be wholly in the 
wrong and utterly unworthy to live. In our own day the con- 
fusion of ideas has reached its height, and results in changes of 
attitude which succeed one another with bewildering rapidity, 
men who at one moment deny all pleas for international justice 
as silly sentimentality firing up immediately afterwards when 
they are accused of applying their own principles with perfect 
consistency, and denying as a disgraceful slander the charge that 
they have followed practices which they have always declared 
to be justifiable. From these symptoms we may conclude that 





difference is rather one of terms than of substance. Rousseau’s dictum 
may be said to express the ethical, if not the legal, conception of modern 
war. 

1 See Hague Convention of 1899, iv., art. 1. This was unaltered in 1907. 
Art. 2, which accords belligerent rights to the population of an invaded 
territory which spontaneously takes up arms without having had time to 
organize itself, was modified in 1907 by the condition, “‘ if they carry arms 
openly.”? The limitation is @ serious one, for in practice the accusation 
against the people of an occupied territory is constantly that they attack 
by stealth. 


RELATIONS BETWEEN COMMUNITIES 267 


the human conscience is uneasy when it is finding formule to 
sanction wrong-doing in international affairs, and that in the 
back of their minds people recognize that justice is justice even 
though there be no power to enforce it. 

In the medizval world such a power was, in fact, found in the 
spiritual supremacy of the Pope, which accustomed men to the 
reconciliation of national independence with a spiritual authority 
to whom all alike could appeal. When the Reformation broke 
up this unity and the discovery of America raised new problems 
of international right and wrong, the modern idea of an inter- 
national code soon emerges. The early writers, like Franciscus 
a Victoria, who boldly challenged the whole position of the 
Spanish in the Indies, were too far ahead of their generation, 
and passed away without sensibly influencing it. The work of 
Grotius, as we have seen, had a more enduring influence, and 
that not only on the usages of war, but on the whole conception 
of nations as being at once politically independent and yet morally 
subject to the law of Nature. A more revolutionary principle 
was introduced, or rather was brought into prominence, by the 
Society of Friends, who denounced all warfare as contrary to 
the teaching of Christ, and sought to recall men to the principle 
of non-resistance. ‘The influence of the Society on the modern 
world is not to be measured by the number of converts to its 
principles. It is a protest which has set the military spirit the 
task of justifying itself. Such justification may be founded in 
theory on the necessities of self-defence. But if self-defence is 
a fully sufficient justification when the genuine motive of resis- 
tance, the study of history compels us to recognize that it is too 
often a mere cloak for aggression. Nor if people are in earnest 
in the desire to restrict war to the occasions on which a nation 
can maintain its plain rights by no other means, will they ques- 
tion that war is a radically rude and barbarous method of attain- 
ing that end, justifiable at best only until means of obtaining 
justice in international affairs are devised by the common-sense 
of civilized humanity. The repeated settlement of difficulties— 
sometimes of a most anxious and iritating nature—by arbitra- 
tion in recent years, the instances of general agreements settling 
outstanding controversies and providing for arbitration on 
future matters of disagreement, and, finally, the provision of a 
standing machinery for such occasions, all point to a partial re- 
placement of war by arbitration, and there seems every reason 
to hope that within a generation the employment of judicial 
arbitrament will be as common among the European states as 
it was in the fifth century B.c. between the states of Greece. 


a 


268 ) MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


The doctrine of natural liberty, particularly as preached by 
Cobden and the Free Traders, also told heavily on the side of 
peace, just as the recrudescence of militarism in our own day 
has been associated, not in this country alone, with economic 
Protection. But the Cobdenite doctrine was negative, and 
might even, if rigidly applied in cases like that of the Armenians, 
be made a justification for a cynical policy of national isolation. 
More elastic and more human was the Gladstonian creed, which, 
following in the tradition of Fox, and equally of Canning, utterly 
broke with the doctrine of state morality and rested international 
dealings on the simple ground of right and wrong as applicable 
to all other human relations. This is the Grotian principle, but 
more thoroughly carried out. For Grotius, holding that states 
were bound by the Law of Nature, conceived their conduct as 


_ restricted only in those directions—and they were not so many— 


with which the Law of Nature dealt. The fuller view allows 
of no fundamental difference between one branch of morality 
and another. One is as “natural” as the other, and so the 
conception that we form of the honour, the true interest, the 
advancement of our country is to be measured by the same 
standards as we apply in judging of what redounds to the honour, 
the true interest, the advancement of our dearest friends. At 
this point we reach the result to which Mazzini was led by one 
road and Comte by another, of each nation as a member of the 


family of nations which constitute humanity, as possessing duties 
- as well as rights in virtue of its position, and as deriving a higher 
' honour and more lasting glory from its services to the greater 
_ whole of which it is a part than from any exhibition of superior 
_ strength shown in rivalry with its fellow-members. Just as 


international law rests in its beginnings on the conception of 
humanity as incarnate in the person of every human being, so 
in the consummated conception of right and brotherhood between 
nations, it touches the other pole of modern ethics—the con- 
ception of humanity as a whole, the sum of all human beings 
and their collective history. In this conception the old group- 
morality disappears. The special relations of citizenship impose 
special obligations, but they are no longer incompatible with 
the wider obligations to humanity at large, but supplement them. 


‘The Englishman owes a duty to England—the mother of free- 


dom, the land of his fathers, the state which protects him, the 


nation which stimulates and guides him with a glorious tradition, 
which it is his most splendid ambition to carry further on its 
_ true line of growth. He does not owe the same duties to France 
_or Germany, but he owes them recognition as members of the 


RELATIONS BETWEEN COMMUNITIES 269 


\family of nations, and there are times when he can best serve 
England by reminding her of what is due to them. The true 
ee is the corner-stone of true internationalism. 

/In all this it is true that we are describing the ideals of thinkers 

and statesmen rather than the practice of nations. Still, that 
such ideals should have come into touch with practical states- 
manship, as in the course of the nineteenth century they un- 
doubtedly did, is itself a fact of the highest importance for 
ethical history. And notwithstanding a certain counter move- 
ment in more recent thought, the actual realization of internation- 
alism contrives, on the whole, to move forward. The develop- 
ment may be compared to the rise of justice within society. 
The civilized world has passed through the age of the blood feud 
in which any quarrel gave rise to a war of extermination, Custom 
has long since restricted the quarrel, excluded non-combatants 
from the ring, and prohibited the general massacre or enslave- 
ment of the kinsfolk. But, as in many primitive societies, there 
is no physical force behind these customs, there is nothing but 
the pressure of opinion and the ethical and religious ideas shared 
by the nations concerned in common with their neighbours. The 
next stage is to institute a court for the settlement of disputes. 
Such a court generally has no powers in early society except the 
moral power of an appeal to opinion, and precisely this is the 
position of the Hague tribunal. It is not difficult to imagine a 
time when the decisions of that tribunal shall have gained such 
authority that to dispute them will be held at once an outrage 
on justice and a menace to the world’s peace—such a menace 
as would provoke a combination of powers to coerce the recalci- 
trant party. At that point the world’s tribunal will have gained 
the executive authority needed to transform it into a fully- 
developed court of justice.! 

1 The above section was written in days of peace. How far and in what 
direction it should be altered in the light of subsequent events, are ques- 


tions to which it is premature to attempt an answer. The passage has, 
therefore, been left as it stood. 


CHAPTER VII 
CLASS RELATIONS 


1. Wz have seen that morality at its outset is bound up with 
the structure of the social group. Between members of any 
one community the obligations recognized may be many and 
stringent, while in relation to outsiders no obligations are re- 
cognized at all. The typical primitive community is, as it were, 
a little island of friends amid a_sea of strangers and enemies. 
The consequences of the group principle we have traced in the 
history of warfare. We have seen it applied in its extreme form 
in the treatment of conquered enemies as men destitute of any 
title to consideration; we have seen that as moral development 
proceeds, it is moderated and softened, but that, except in the 
highest ethical thought, it does not wholly disappear. ‘Through- 
out history we have the standing contrast of the comparative 
peace, order and co-operation within each organized society, 
and the disunion constantly tending to hostility found in the 
relations of different societies to one another. We have now to 
trace the operation of the same principle upon the structure of 
society itself. 

The primitive community is, as a rule, small, but compact and 
homogeneous. There is always the distinction between its own 
members and outsiders; there is also a greater or less distinction 
in the rights enjoyed by the two sexes. In other respects the 
obligations constituting its ethical life are fairly uniform. But 
as society grows and its industrial life develops, as primitive 
barbarism gives way to some degree of culture, this simplicity 
of the early social organization breaks up, and now the group 
principle obtains a fresh development. Distinct groups arise 
within each society, within the limits of a single community, 
under one king or one governing body. Besides the group of 
free men—to use that term provisionally—who constitute the 
members of the community in the fullest sense of the word, there 
arise inferior classes, slaves or serfs or low-caste men who are in 
the community and yet not of it, who are subject to its laws and 
customs, but not possessed of all the civil rights which member- 
ship confers. These inferior groups within the community 

270 


CLASS RELATIONS 271 


occupy a position which is morally and legally analogous to 
that of strangers and enemies. In extreme cases they are wholly 
devoid of rights, in other cases their inferiority is marked by a 
more or less serious lack of the civil rights enjoyed by their 
superiors. Historically, in the case of slaves, their position is, 
in point of fact, very largely that of incorporated enemies, and 
whether this corresponds to the historical fact or not, ethically 
speaking, the denial of personal rights from which they suffer is 
a consequence of that same group-morality which from the first 
contrasts friend and neighbour with stranger and enemy, and 
denies to the one the elementary rights of a human being, which 
are readily accorded to the other. 
‘Not merely political privileges, but civil rights, the right of 
Polding property, the right of personal freedom, the right of 
marriage, even the right of protection of life or limb, are wholly 
or in part denied to classes excluded from full membership of 
the community. Such distinctions of personal status are found 
in one form or another in the great mass of societies, civilized 
or uncivilized, which stand above the lowest stages of culture. 
They persist well into the modern period, and are but slowly 
modified, and partially abrogated in proportion as the whole 
principle of group-morality yields to ethical criticism. Of these 
distinctions the commonest is, of course, the distinction between 
slave and free, but slavery is in many cases replaced by serfdom 
and in others by caste. What is common to all three institutions 
is the derogation from full rights which they imply. In detail 
they are distinct, though the line of demarcation is not always 
easy to draw. We may say that the slave, properly regarded, 
is a man whom law and custom regard as the property of another. 
In extreme cases he is wholly without rights, a pure chattel; in 
ther cases he may be protected in certain respects, but so may 
noxoranass. As long as he is for all ordinary purposes com- 
letely at his master’s disposal, rendering to his master the fruits 
of his work, performing his work under orders, rewarded at his 
master’ 8 discretion, and liable to punishment on his master’s 
judgment, he may, though protected in other relations, fairly be 
called aslave. If, onthe other hand, he has by his position certain 
countervailing rights, e.g. to inherited property from which he 
cannot (except for some default) be dislodged, he becomes, though 
still liable to labour under his master’s direction, still subject, 
perhaps, to punishment and still in an inferior legal position, 
no longer a slave, but aserf. Serf and slave alike belong to some 
definite master, public or private. A servile caste,on the other 
Band, is not necessarily in the ownership of any man or body 


’ 





q 


272 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


‘of men. It is distinguished by a greater or less lack of personal 
| rights, by social inferiority, and probably by a taboo cutting it 


off from intercourse with others. And as there may be servile | 


castes falling below the normal level of free men, so there may 
be privileged castes of nobles possessing, as it were, an excess 
of rights, and thesé’privileges may indirectly depress the position 
of the ordinary member of society and impair his freedom by 
withholding protection from him in relation to one of the nobility. 
Finally, the whole community may suffer a similar depression in 
relation to the king, who, in the extreme development of the 
despotic principle, becomes, as we have seen, eminent owner of 
all property and lord of the persons of his subjects. In such 
cases, though there may still be distinct grades in society, yet 
all subjects alike are in principle destitute of rights. 

Now all these methods of the gradation of rights, if the phrase 
be allowed, rest ultimately on the principle of group-morality— 
she principle that_rights and duties do not attach to the human 
‘béing as such, but are determined by extraneous considerations, 
social, political, or religious. The development which this prin- 
ciple attains vatiés very greatly in different societies, and depends 
upon economic and social, as well as on ethical and religious 
conditions ; but its operation, in one form or another, persists 
throughout history, and is-one of the dominant facts, if not the 
dominant-fact, ethically considered, in the evolution of human 


SOAR SOE erence 


society. In tracing its varied development, we shall for the 


most part follow the history of slavery and serfdom as the 
main line along which it runs. We shall, however, deal with 
other forms which the principle assumes, as occasion requires. 


2. In the primitive group, as has been said, we find, as a rule, 
no distinction of slave and free, no serfdom, no caste, and little, 
if any, distinction between chief and follower. Taking this 
statement alone, one might-infer that the primitive savage 
realizes the ideal of the philosopher of a community of free men 
and equals; but the savage enjoys freedom and equality, not 
because he has realized the value of those conceptions, but be- 
cause neither he nor his fellow is strong enough to put himself 
above his neighbour. Two conditions suffice to ensure the 
growth of slavery or of a servile castéin the savage world. The 
first condition is a certain development of industrialism. In a 
hunter tribe, which lives from hand to mouth, there is little 
occasion for the services of a slave. The harder and less in- 
teresting work can be put upon the women, and the chief occupa- 
tion of the men is to fight. This brings us at once to the second 





CLASS RELATIONS 273 


condition, which is a measure of warlike prowess, giving to_a__ 
tribe the means of supplying slaves from its captives. But not 
only must a tribe thatis to obtain captive slaves, conquer; it 
must also refrain from putting its captives to death, and we have 
already seen how the difficulty—of—exercising such restraint 
militates against the rise of slavery in savage society, and how, 
in consequence, though the idea of slavery is widely diffused in 
the uncivilized world, the institution grows more important step 
by step with the develo t of civilization. We find many 
civilized peoples, where slavery has attained a luxuriant growth, 
retaining a tradition of a time at which there were no slaves, 
and these traditions may well preserve an historical truth. But 
the enslavement of the vanquished is not the only alternative 
Open to a conquering people. Instead of apportioning the 
captives to individuals as their booty, they may reduce the 
conquered tribe collectively to a servile position. In that case 
we get from the first a system of public serfdom. ~ In other cases, 
again, possibly as a development of this practice, the distinction 
of conqueror and conquered hardens into a distinction of caste 
sanctioned by religion. Finally, the development of military 
organization, aid the consequent rise of the power of the chief, 
are responsible for that form of “‘rightlessness ’ in which all 
members of the tribe become slaves of the king.? 

“In one or other of these different forms we find the conception 
of a class of men, wholly or partly destitute of rights, widely 
diffused throughout the uncivilized world. The special home of 
slavery is, of course, Negro Africa, where the exceptions in which 
the institution is not found are quite inconsiderable.2 In 


1 Post (Afrik. Jurisp., vol. i. p. 115 seq.) gives a number of African 
peoples in which the king has absolute powers of life and death over his 
people, and a number in which all subjects are regarded as his slaves. 
Among the Kaffirs the king could take any man’s cattle to replace his 
own. 

2 According to Waitz (vol. ii. p. 398), slavery was for the most part 
unknown among Kaffirs, and the case of a sale of children recorded by 
Moffat is regarded as exceptional. A less favourable view of Kaffir warfare 
is taken by Letourneau (Esclavage, p. 53), who says that they took girl 
prisoners as concubines and youths as slaves, though their manners were 
too savage for regular slavery. Letourneau also draws attention (pp. 54, 
55) to a servile class, called balala, among the Bechuanas, who had no 
possessions, had to perform manual labour in return for food, might be 
slain for disobedience, and supplied victims for human sacrifice upon 
occasion. We have here something more nearly approaching a caste 
distinction than ordinary slavery. 

The Hottentots, according to Letourneau (ib., pp. 49-51), gave no 
quarter and held no slaves, but, according to authorities cited by Kohler 
(Z. jf. V. R., 1902, p. 340), slavery, though it has now disappeared, existed 
formerly, and the slaves were at the masters’ mercy and often ill-treated. 





2) UA ACN NR rer EMIT Late ccenr wren OM Z 
oy aan ate BN at y 
onl neg ae 
- SW Om OT.NyG reagan ences BY mm LT UY * , 
TL te aturetiiarieens 


274 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


Oceania there is more variety. In some of the islands, as has 
been seen, war is but little known, and in these cases slavery is 


also absent ;+ but there are other causes militating against its 


i! 


A 


development. In Melanesia cannibalism is frequent, and in 


some cases, for example in Fiji, slaves are kept for cannibal 
purposes.2, In Micronesia, again, a strongly-marked caste divi- 


sion partially replaces slavery, though there may be slaves in 


the proper sense in addition to the servile caste. Throughout 


Polynesia caste is more prominent than slavery. It is a Poly-— 


nesian saying, that “‘a chief cannot steal,” and in Tahiti, if a 
chief asks, ‘“‘ Whose is that tree, etc.,’’ the owner answers, 
“Yours and mine.” The killing of one of the lower by a member 
of the higher class is regarded as merely a peccadillo.* In 
Micronesia the original principle of the constitution seems to 
have been a division into two castes, the one god-like, immortal, 
and possessing all the power; the other having no souls, no 
property, no wives, and doing all the hard labour; but below 
these again were the enslaved prisoners.® In the Malay region 
slavery is widely diffused, especially in the towns,®* though, as 
we shall see later, its forms differ, and in some cases, particularly 
under Mohammedan influence, the slave is by no means rightless. 
Among the rude Indian hill tribes the institution is naturally 
less developed. In some cases, as among the Bodos and Dhimals, 
there are apparently no slaves, and the same is said to be true 
of some of the Naga tribes. Other Nagas, however, make slaves 
of captives,’ and among many other hill tribes slaves are held.’ 


1 For example, in the little island of Rotuna slavery proper did not exist 
and casual strangers were usually married and adopted into a clan. Some 
Fijians and Melanesians, however, have been treated as inferiors, not being 
adopted (J. S. Gardiner, in J. A. J., xxvii. 486). In parts of New 
Guinea there is no slavery (Letourneau, p. 39); it is the exception among 
the Papuas (2b., p. 35, and Kohler, Z. f. V. R., 1900, p. 364). 

2 Letourneau, op. cit., p. 41. Broadly, Letourneau concludes Melanesian 
slavery originated for the sake of cannibalism. 

3 Thus in the Marquesas Islands there were no slaves, but a despised 
lower class who furnished victims for human sacrifice (Letourneau, p. 183). 

4 ib., 188. 

5 Waitz, v. ii. 125. In the Carolinas not only was intermarriage 
forbidden, but the lower caste had to avoid contact with the higher on 
pain of death. Fishery and sea-faring were forbidden occupations to the 
lower caste. 

® See Waitz, Anthropologie, v. i. 154 seq.; Ratzel, History of Mankind, 
i. 446. 

7 Slavery is said to be universal among the Aos (Godden, J. A. I., 


xxvi. 184), but the Luhupas and one or two other tribes are said to 


have no slaves and to be opposed to the institution. All the Nagas are 
head-hunters (Godden, J. A. J., xxvii. 12). 

8 e.g. Kukis, Garos, Gonds and Khonds, who use slaves for sacrifices. 
The Lakka Kols have serfs instead of slaves (Letourneau, pp. 305-306). 


CLASS RELATIONS 275 


The nomad tribes of Central Asia do not generally spare their 
captives, and still practise human sacrifice, but the richer tribes 
are slave-holders.1. Among the North American Indians slavery 
is but little developed east of the Rockies, though there were a 
few tribes which occasionally practised ? it as an alternative to 
the torture or adoption of prisoners. In the west and north, 
however, it was widely diffused,? though here also, in some cases, 
the indiscriminate massacre of prisoners was the common 
alternative. In some tribes of tropical South America war 
captives are enslaved, but prisoners may also be put to death 
or adopted as members of the tribe.4| The dependence of slavery 
on the economic factor is shown by its regular increase at each 
economic grade. The following table ® shows the number of 
peoples who hold slaves either in permanence or as objects of 
a regular traffic; the second column reduces this number to a 
fraction of all the cases in each grade where information was 
obtained about war and warlike matters, this being the depart- 
ment of ethnography in which we are most likely to meet with 
statements as to slavery if it exists. 


Numbers of Fraction of the 
Slave-holding Total Number 
Peoples. of Peoples. 

Tower hunters... 0. 1 "02 
Higher Hunters... ». 26 *325 
POMICUUTON EN. 1.) 143 33 
LEE a Vyas es 5t 37 
Peotipare Lb ee, 594 “46 
LO tip I On i a 12 pre 
Periitre EE ee 77 °78 


1 Ratzel, vol. iii. p. 346. According to Letourneau (p. 223), a form of 
serf cultivation is more strongly developed than personal slavery. 

2 e.g. according to Waitz (vol. iii. p. 158), the tribes of North Carolina, 
the Navajos, Iroquois and Hurons. 

3 Thus, among the Oregons, prisoners ,were enslaved “from time im- 
memorial’? and sometimes sacrificed at the death of a master (Alvord, 
in Schoolcraft, v. 654). Slavery is said to have extended over the 
whole north-west coast (Waitz, vol. iii. p. 329). At Nootka Sound 
prisoners when spared were enslaved. The Chinooks made slave razzias 
and held the slave as a chattel and object of trade (ib., pp. 334, 338). 
The Apaches killed the male captives, but sometimes held the women as 
slaves (Reclus, p. 128). 

4 Schmidt, Z. f. V. R., 1898, p. 294. According to Letourneau (p. 123) 
the nomads of the Pampas rarely give quarter to males, but sometimes 
take women as slave concubines and bring up children to be adopted into 
the conquering tribe. 

5 From the Simpler Peoples, pp. 235-236. 


276 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


The proportions show an increase at each grade* which, 
rough as the classification necessarily is, and imperfect as our 
information must be, can hardly be altogether accidental. It 
is of interest to set side by side with these figures the correspond- | 
ing table for “nobility,” by which we mean an upper rank, 
other than the ruling chief with his immediate family, distin- 
guished by privileges, greater or less, from the mass of the 
people. 


NOBLES 
Cases. Fractions, 

Lower Hunters seg ar 0 0 

Higher Hunters . 9 a 
Agriculture I 1} 03 
Pastoral I BAN TIEN, Tapet 3) 20 
ASTICULLOLe. DLC) (iii Glam 19 "15 
Pastoral II HRS HC PENG | 4 °24 
Asricultire: UL dr is a es 23 23 


The proportions are much smaller, but the tendency is in the 
same direction.2 The same advance in social and industrial 
\jorganization which tends to the formation of a servile class 
‘below the ordinary free man works, though less surely and 

apidly, to the elevation of a small class above him. 

| Thus we may fairly say (1) that in the rudest tribes there are 
no class distinctions, the harder and more menial work falling 
often (though not always) upon the women; (2) as a tribe 
grows in culture, and especially in military strength, the first 
result is, as a rule, that the conquered enemies are sacrificed, 
eaten, tortured, or in any case put to death. But (3) with a 
certain softening of manners, or at any rate with a cooler 
perception of permanent advantage, prisoners are spared and 
enslaved. ‘This grace is first reserved for women and children, 
but is afterwards extended to male captives. A class is thus 
‘formed who are within the jurisdiction of the conquering tribe, 
but from the point of view of law and morals remain outside it. 
Hither in the form of a class of slaves or of a degraded quasi- 
servile lower caste, the presence of such an element in the 


1 The results do not differ markedly from Dr. Nieboer’s, whose work 
should be consulted on the point, though we include (1) cases where women 
and children only are held as slaves, and (2) cases in which slaves are taken 
to sell again, both of which he excludes. 

2 It should be said that of. the nine cases among the Higher Hunters 
eight are from the Fisher peoples of the Pacific Coast, who also supply the 
great majority of the cases of slavery in this grade. 


CLASS RELATIONS 277 


population is a general feature in societies which have emerged 
from the lower savagery and the rawest militarism. On the 
strict principle of group-morality this class is destitute of rights, 
and only too often the principle is consistently carried out. 
The typical slave can neither marry nor hold property except 
on sufferance. His very life is in his master’s hands. He may 
be flogged, maimed, sold, pawned, given away, exchanged, or 
put to death. 


/3. In many slave systems, however, this “ rightlessness ”’ is 

/qualified in various ways. How this qualification arises we 
shall best understand if we take a more complete view of the 
actual sources from which slaves are recruited. Hitherto we 
have spoken only of captivesin war. But this, though probably 
the original method by which a servile class is formed, is not the 
only method by which it is recruited. Of other methods the 
first and greatest is inheritance—for normally a slave’s child 
is also a slave. Secondly, in most barbaric and semi-civilized 
societies the numbers of the slave class are swollen by other 
causes, principally by debt, crime, and the slave trade. In some 
cases slavery is the prescribed penalty for crime. More often 
the man who cannot pay the prescribed composition either falls 
into slavery himself as a debt-slave in order, as it were, to work 
out his debt, or sells, particularly under the sway of the fully 
developed patria potestas, his wife or child for that purpose. 
“What! shall I starve as long as my sister has children whom 
she can sell ?”’ was the remark of an African negro to Burton— 
a remark which comprises a whole chapter upon primitive ethics 
in a few words. 

The formation of debtor-slaves, and even the increase of 
hereditary slaves, has, however, a certain softening influence 
upon the institution of slavery itself, for while the captive slave 
remains an enemy in the sight of law and morals and is there- 
fore rightless, the debtor or the criminal was originally a member 
of the community, and in relation to him there is apt to arise 
‘some limitation of the power of the master. The family of the 
debtor-slave will not see him treated with unlimited cruelty ; 
they retain some right of protection, however illogically, just 
as they retain protection over the purchased wife, however 
illogically. In fact, the slave is no longer a mere stranger or 
enemy. He is partially incorporated in the community and has 
some recognized rights, though by no means those of a free man. 
The improvement tends to extend itself to the hereditary slave 
who also was born in the community, though within the slave 


278 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


class. Thus there comes to be a distinction between the 
domestic slave and the slave who is captured or bought from 
abroad. The one remains a chattel-slave, the other is becoming a 
serf. There are thus many gradations of “ rightlessness ”’ in the 
servile status, and these must very briefly be passed in review. 
Customs protecting the slave from undue tyranny are found 
in the barbaric and semi-civilized world, though in many cases 
_ they are not derived from barbaric ideas, but are traceable to the 
influence of Mohammedanism. In these customs the distinction 
between the domestic and the foreign slave is generally well 
marked. Illustrations of almost every degree in “ rightlessness ”’ 
may be drawn from African slavery. Thus, among the Foulah, 
house slaves are treated as members of the family, and are sold 
only in necessity or for a punishment, while war captives and 
purchased foreign slaves are wholly without rights. In Bambara 
captives are pure chattels, but house slaves have a good position 
and in some cases are treated as members of the family. Among 
the Timmanees, the Bulloms, and the Beni-amer, no one is sold 
as a slave who was not bought as such. Among the Mandin- 
goes native slaves are protected, while others are at the mercy of 
the master to sell or kill. On the Congo the captive slave may 
be sold, but house slaves only after a palaver—that is, with the 
consent of the community. Among the Barea and Kunama the 
master has no right of life and death over native slaves. At 
Timbuctoo no native can be enslaved at all. Among the West 
Equatorial tribes the slave may be killed by his master, but not 
sold abroad except for some transgression. At Nuffi a master 
may strike, but not mutilate or kill his slave. In Sokoto and 
among the Yolofs the captive slave may be sold at will, the born 
slave only after repeated chastisement. In Bihé pawn-slaves 
are protected, while bought ones can be arbitrarily punished, 
and only in the case of their death is a small fine due from the 
owner to the king. Among the Mpongwe the house slave can 
only be sold for some offence, and here slaves call their master 
‘father ’’ and are well treated. The Fantis recognize the dis- 
tinction between the slaves of their own tribe and those of other 
tribes, and among the Ibu, on the Niger, slaves can hold property, 
build houses and marry.!. They then rank as free, owing only a 
yearly tax, and the relation, in fact, passes into a kind of light 
serfdom. Similarly at Sokoto, the slave is at about the age 
of twenty given a wife and set up in a hut in the country. At 
Boussa they farm the land on the métayer principle, and though 
in law the masters could sell them and take their wives, children 
1 See Post, Afrik, Jurisprudenz, i. 88, 92, 96; Waitz, ii. 213-214, 


CLASS RELATIONS 279 


-and goods, in practice they enjoy much liberty and _ property.! 
Various forms of serfdom, existing often side by side with 
slavery, are common in Africa, the serf cultivating the land 
and owing labour service or payment in kind, and sometimes 
holding property of his own.” 

/A right frequent in Mohammedan countries, found also in one 
or two instances of non-Mohammedan tribes, is that of changing 
the master. Thisaslave can effect by the legal process of nore 
datio, by which, on inflicting some injury on some man other 
_than his own master, he, ipso facto, becomes that man’s slave. 
Among the Barea and Kunama a native slave can simply leave 
for another village and so become free. In Zanzibar slaves 
obtain this right as the result of deliberate ill-treatment, and the 
same custom is found on the Congo, among the Apingi, and 
other West Equatorial tribes. In Ashanti slaves can commend 
themselves to a new master by giving him the right of life and 
death over them, and in Timbuctoo, if ill-treated, a slave may 
appeal to the court in order to be sold. Among the Beni-amer 
the distinction between the born slave and the foreign slave is 
well marked in the case of homicide. For the bought slave only 
the ‘“‘ wer ”’ can be demanded, but the born slave can be avenged 
by blood. The marriage of slaves depends generally upon the 
will of the master. In relation to property their rights vary 
greatly, and here again the distinction of origin of slaves makes 
itself felt, e.g. among the Bogos and Marea a slave who is the 
son of a free-born man has the right to buy his freedom, a right 
which is denied to the slave by birth.’ 

Of the various tribes mentioned, those in which protection is 
carried furthest are for the most part either partially Mohammed- 
anized or partially Christianized,* and while some distinction 
between domestic and foreign slaves may be attributed to 
Negroland generally, such further amelioration of the slave’s 
position as is to be found in barbarous or semi-civilized Africa 
is probably to be attributed to the higher ethics of a civilized 
religion.» The same influence is found at work among the 
Malays, where the distinction of native and foreign slaves also 

1 Letourneau, p. 103. Yet at Sokoto captive slaves, besides being 
frequently sold, are treated as beasts of burden and chained for trivial 
offences (Post, A. J., i. 96; Letourneau, L’Hsclavage, p. 102). 

2 For instances, see Post, Afrik. Jurisp., pp. 98, 101, 106. In case of 
failure to make due payments the serf is often reduced to the position of a 
slave, e.g. among the Takue, Marea, and Bogos. Among the Beni-amer 
the penalty of failure is death (Post, A. J., i. 101). 

3. Instances are found at Khartoum, among the Usagara the Futatoro, 


and among the Kimbunda (Post, A. J., 103, 105, 112). 
4 Letourneau, 88. > Letourneau, p. 72 seq. 


280 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


re-appears. Speaking generally, the captive slaves are destitute 
of rights, and the capture and sale of slaves is a chief line of 
business among all Malays. who trade in ships of their own. 
But crime and debt are also rich sources of slavery,' and in some 
parts at least the slave has a measure of protection. In the 
Malacca Peninsula, where the influence of Islam is strong, the 
slave, if struck, may bring his master into court, and the slave 
woman who bears a child to her master goes free.2 The Battaks 
also, head-hunters though they are, put a limit on the master’s 
right of punishment.® 

Thus in the barbaric world we already find degrees of right- 
lessness, and a measure of legal or customary protection, at least 
for certain classes of slaves. This alleviation is often, but not 
always,* traceable to the influence of one of the higher religions. 
The free man who has become a slave is not wholly cut off from 
membership of the community, but retains certain recognized 
rights, though by no means those which full membership confers. 
We have now to see how the idea of slavery, and of rightlessness 
generally, fare in the main forms of civilization. 


4. In the early Babylonian Empire slavery was fully de- 
veloped as an institution, though slaves were not so numerous as 
they afterwards became. ‘The slave is spoken of in the contracts * 
not as a man, but asachattel. Slaves are reckoned in a transfer 
as so many pieces of “goods. They were distinguished by a 
brand, and, if they were runaways, often wore fetters.6 They 
are recruited by capture, by debt, and by the sale of wives or 
children by husbands or fathers. They pass on a man’s death 
to his heirs, and can be pawned, given away or sold. With 
the exception of debt-slaves, the Code of Hammurabi makes no 


1 Waitz, v. i. 143, 153. 2 2b., 153-155. 

$ According to Letourneau (p. 200), the master may punish, but not put 
the slaves to death. According to Waitz (op. cit., p. 188), punishment 
must be inflicted by a magistrate. The slave becomes a concubine by 
prolonged cohabitation, and sometimes a legitimate wife (Letourneau, 
loc. cit.). Among the more savage Battaks slaves are used for human 
sacrifices (Letourneau, p. 203). 

* Apart from some of the instances already given, in ancient Mexico, 
where captive slaves were taken principally for food, domestic slaves 
were protected. They might not be sold without their consent, nor 
chastised without previous warning. If ill-treated they might take refuge 
with the king, and to kill them was a capital offence. They could hold 
property and marry, and their children were free (Letourneau, pp. 157, 
158; cf. also Payne, vol. ii. p. 485 note 3). 

5 ‘The contracts yield no instance of more than four in a family, and 
Bay houses often have only one (Meissner, Altbabylon. Privatrecht, pp. 

& Meissner, loc. cit, 


CLASS RELATIONS 281 


provision for their protection against their masters. The only 
case in which it prescribes any treatment is that of the repudia- 
tion of their master, in which the penalty assigned is the com- 
paratively light one of losing an ear. In practice, however, 
it would seem that the punishments for running away were 
severe.1 The provisions in the Code for cases of injury to a 
slave by some one other than his master are full of significance. 
The slave’s life has its price, but clearly the price goes to the 
master, for in the passages which refer to the killing of a slave 
the law is that the offender shall render slave for slave. For 
example— 


“Tf a doctor has treated the severe wound of a slave of a 
plebeian with a bronze lancet and has caused his death, he shall 
render slave for slave. 

“Tf he has opened his abscess with a bronze lancet and has 
made him lose his eye, he shall pay money, half his price.” 2 


Similarly, the defaulting builder who causes a free man’s death 
is punished by the law of retaliation, but if it is a slave who 
dies “‘he shall give slave for slave.” * This is pleasant for the 

master, but of no particular value to the slave, and so when 
sec. 199 says that if a man “has caused the loss of the eye of 
a gentleman’s servant, or has shattered the limb of a gentleman’s 
servant, he shall pay half his price,’ we may assume that it is 
the owner who benefits. The loss of life or limb by a slave is 
loss to the master, and is made good by compensating him— 
so completely is the slave his chattel. Debt-slaves, however, 
were, as has been noticed, in a more favourable position. Their 
[rons is limited to three years. If a man has a debt, says 
lause 117, ‘‘ and he has given his wife, his son, his daughter, 
for the money, or has handed them over to work off the debt, for 
three years they shall work in the house of their buyer or ex- 
ploiter, in the fourth year he shall fix their liberty.’’ Further, 
the person seized by a creditor in distraint is protected by 
retaliation or price, according as he is a free man or slave.® 


1 Meissner, loc. cit., and De Servitude, p. 2. 
2 Hammurabi, secs. 219, 220. 3 Op. cit., sec. 231. 
4 Compare the clauses dealing with miscarriage, 213, 214: “If he has 
struck a man’s maidservant, and caused her to drop that which is in her 
womb, he shall pay two shekels of silver. If that maidservant has died, 
he shall pay one-third of a mina of silver.” 
5 Notwithstanding the bad legal position of slaves, the code contemplates 
the marriage of slaves with free women, sec. 175. 
6 Sec. 116. The clause contemplates distraint upon the person only 
(Dareste, Journal des Savants, Oct. 1902, p. 526), and apparently the seizure 
_ of the son or slave of the actual debtor. 


282 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


In practice, the position of the Babylonian slave was probably 
much more favourable than it appears in legal theory. In the 
records of the New Kingdom, slaves often appear as principals 
in business transactions. They carry on trades or businesses, 
such as banking, and have a peculiwm which is virtually assured 
to them, though in law it may be their master’s, and for which 
. they pay a yearly tribute to the owner. Out of this peculiwm 

some slaves, if not all, might buy back their liberty We find 
them entering into contracts with other slaves and even with 
free men, suing and sued at law, and in many ways acting as 
though free.2, On the other hand, they might be branded. The 
rich Itti-Marduk-Balatu buys two slaves, one marked on the 
ears and the eyes and one who is simply described as branded, 
for three mine.2 This same great banker disposes of a slave 
girl to one purchaser after another for immoral purposes, and a 
contract selling a woman to a brothel-keeper is preserved.* ‘The 
slave girl was entirely at the disposal of her master, and 
indeed, if he totally neglected her, it was held that she would 
in time become a malevolent being with demoniac powers, 
against whom magical conjurations were pronounced.® Slaves 
were freely pawned, given away and sold. Putting all the facts 
together, it would seem that there were different classes of 
slaves, distinguished in practice and by custom if not in law, 
and that, while some of them had practical enjoyment of various 
important rights, the conception of chattel slavery had by no 
means disappeared. 

Our information as to ancient Egyptian slavery is not so 
precise as it is for Babylon, and when dealing with a history 
extending over, perhaps, four or five thousand years, it is easy to 
make statements which would be true of one period, but would 
not hold of others. Some broad features, however, appear 

/tolerably constant. The main sources of recruitment of slaves 
‘in the full sense of the term were capture and the slave trade. 
\The conquering Egyptians did not always kill all their male 
captives, but frequently took them alive, and throughout their 
history down to the New Kingdom frequently organized warlike 
expeditions or razzzas for the purpose of slave-hunting.® Prisoners 


1 Oppert, Condition des Esclaves d Babylone, p. 4. 

2 Kohler and Peiser, Aus dem babylonischen Rechtsleben, hft. i. 1; 
ii. 6. 

3% Meissner, De Servitute, p. 20. 

* Kohler and Peiser, op. cit., iv. 28-29. 

*» Maspero, Dawn of Civilization, p. 735. 

5 See above, chap. vi. pp. 247-— 248, and frequent references in Breasted’s 
Ancient Records, 


CLASS RELATIONS 283 


» were taken for service on the public works,! or to the harems, 
_ and it appears from the Tell-el-Amarna letters that, in addition 
_to thousands of female slave captives, there was a regular 
tribute of girls from various places.2- On the public works, the 
pyramids, the great temples and palaces, the labour and lives of 
the captives were prodigally spent. Rameses IV., in one expedi- 
tion for transporting great blocks of granite, employed 5000 
common soldiers, 800 barbarian mercenaries, 2000 bond-servants 
of the temples and 200 officers. When foreign captives were not 
available the Pharaohs employed their subjects.® 

An idea of the number of slaves in Egypt may be formed 
from the fact that in the cause of thirty years Rameses III. 
presented 113,433 to the temples alone.t These slaves were 
apparently entirely at the disposal of their master, who removed 
them from place to place, sold them, used them as he pleased, 
pursued them if they succeeded in escaping, and had the right 
of re-capturing them as soon as he received information of their 
whereabouts. They worked for him under their overseers’ 
orders, receiving no regular wages, and with no hope of recover- 
ing their liberty. The captives, however, apparently inter- 
married frequently with natives, and had families and descendants 
who, at the end of two or three generations, became assimilated 
with the indigenous races, and passed into the condition of 

erfdom. How far this serfdom extended, and what classes 
were free, it is difficult to say with precision. Erman points 
out that in the early Empire, if we went only by the monuments 
and representations in the tombs, we might conclude that there 
was no intermediate class between the great men in the kingdom, 
the priests and officers, on the one hand, and the crowd of 
labourers and serfs on the other; but probably there must have 
been some middle class which helped to bring Egyptian art and 
handicraft to their pitch of perfection.? In the New Kingdom 


1 Diodorus describes the suffering of captive slaves, including women 
and old men, in the Nubian gold mines. His description refers to the 
_ times of the Ptolemies, but there is no reason to suppose that things had got 
any worse under the rule of the Greeks (Erman, Life in Ancient Kgypt, 
463; Diodorus, ii. 11). 

2 Flinders Petrie, History of Egypt, vol. ii. p. 274. 

3 Erman, p. 476. 4 Maspero, p. 326. 

5 Maspero, loc. cit. In a large measure the slave work was done in the 
regular workhouses, or ergastula. For the employment of bondwomen in 
these places, see W. Max Miiller, Liebespoesie, p. 6. 

6 Inscriptions of the Old Kingdom bequeath or transfer the ‘‘ people ”’ on 
the land along with the small cattle (Breasted, i. 77, 91, etc.). 

7 Erman, pp. 100, 101. On the other hand, from the calculations of 
Breasted (iv. 98) it appears that not more than two per cent. of the 
population were temple property in the time of Rameses IIT. 


284 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


the peasant serfs were strictly part of the property of the crown, 
or the temple to which the land belonged. They were despised 
by the scribes, and their condition is the subject of many 
contemporary descriptions implying abject servility. 

The following verses refer to the slaves— 


“The poor child is only brought up, 
That he may be torn from his mother’s arms ; 
As soon as he comes to man’s estate, 
His bones are beaten like those of a donkey; 
He is driven, he has indeed no heart in his body.” ? 


Even more graphic are the descriptions in the Sallier 
papyrus— 


“ The stone-cutter, who seeks his living by working in all kinds 
of durable stone, when at last he has earned something, and his 
two arms are worn out, he stops; but if at sunrise he remain 
sitting, his legs are tied to his back. . . . When the (mason’s) 
work is quite finished, if he has bread, he returns home, and his 
children have been beaten unmercifully (during his absence). 
The weaver within doors is worse off there than a woman; 
squatting, his knees against his chest, he does not breathe. If 
during the day he slackens weaving, he is bound fast as the 
lotuses of the lake; and it is by giving bread to the doorkeeper 
that the latter permits him to see the light.” 2 


As in other ancient civilization debt was probably one source 
of slavery. At any rate, under the New Kingdom we have con- 
tracts of slavery in which a man or woman acknowledges him- 
or herself as the slave of another. All his or her property belonged 
to the master, and the status might be hereditary,? but to judge 
from the wording, which is nearly the same as that of adoption, 
this form of servitude was easy. Documents relating to the 
sale of slaves from the same period are quite different in tone. 
We may suppose that in accepting servitude a man might retain 
certain rights which would not belong to a captive or hereditary 
slave.4 

More than this, it would seem that even the free man, who 
was unrestricted in his power to move about and dispose of 
himself and his labour, was insecure unless he had his master, 


1 Erman, p. 128. 2 Maspero, p. 312. 
* [am thy slave for ever. Nevermore shall I be able to act as nembe 
(perhaps debtor, or tenant) to thee . . . together with my children that 


are born and those who shall be born to us, and all that belongeth to us 
(Griffith, Rylands Papyri, iii. 52, cf. 56). 
* Griffith, iii. 58, 59. 


CLASS RELATIONS 285 


' who would afford to him protection. Egyptian society, in fact,, 
_ was organized upon a, feudal basis. . 


“From the top to the bottom of the social scale every free 
man acknowledged a master, who secured to him justice and 
protection in exchange for his obedience and fealty. The moment 
an Egyptian tried to withdraw himself from this subjection, the 
peace of his life was at an end; he became a man without a 
master, and . . . without a recognized protector. . . . Any one 
might stop him on the way, steal his cattle, merchandise and 
property on the most trivial pretext, and if he attempted to 
_ protest, might beat him with almost certain impunity.” + 


Further, it is only in a qualified sense that freedom can be 
_ spoken of at all in relation to a country governed as Egypt was. 
As against the king or a great feudal lord, the Egyptian peasant 
often, if nominally free and possessed of his own plot of land, 
was without defence and without recognized rights. The tax- 
gatherer was in ancient Egypt what he remained to the Modern 
Period. Here is the description of him true to the life in the 
Sallier papyrus.” 


“The scribe steps out of the boat at the landing-place to levy 
the tithe, and there come the keepers of the doors of the granary 
with cudgels and the negroes with ribs of palm-leaves, who come 
crying: “Come now, corn!’ There is none, and they throw 
the cultivator full length upon the ground; bound, dragged to 
the canal, they fling him in head first; his wife is bound with 
him, his children are put in chains; the neighbours, in the mean- 
time, leave him, and fly to save their grain.” 


The system of forced labour was no less oppressive to the 
peasantry than that of the collection of taxes. The slaves were 
insufficient to cultivate the royal and seignorial lands, and the 
balance of the work fell upon the neighbouring peasantry, none 
being exempt except the destitute, soldiers on service, with their 
families, certain public employés and servitors of the temple. 
‘The work was hard, and enforced by the stick, and not only 
did it recur at regular periods, but in addition there were 
irregular corvées whenever it suited the king or lord to demand 
them.® 


1 2b., 309. 2 7b., 331. 

8 ib., 333, etc. Most of our information refers to the Ptolemaic period, 
but the practice was undoubtedly more ancient, being referred to in 
inscriptions of the Middle Empire. ‘The entire Oryx nome laboured for 
me,” says Ameni (12th Dynasty—Breasted, i. 252). ‘‘ The rod is in my 
hand; be not idle,” says the taskmaster to the builders under the 18th 
Dynasty (Breasted, ii. 293). 


286 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


The slave, properly so called, was not indeed wholly, or, at 
any rate, not at all times, destitute of rights. According to 
Diodorus his murder was punished with death, the object of the 
law being, in the view of the Greek historian, to keep people 
from bad actions not through differences of fortune, but rather 
from the nature of the actions themselves, and at the same time 
to accustom a man by care for slaves to avoid far more all 
offences against free men.’ This is a thoroughly Greek. inter- 
pretation of the facts. It would probably be truer to say that 
in a despotic land like Egypt the distinction between free man 
and slave before the law was of less account than in a civic state. 
The king was by Egyptian principle master of the whole land 
of Egypt, owner of all property and lord of all men who dwelt 
therein. The Egyptian recognized duties to dependents, as 
appears from pleadings in the Book of the Dead, in which the 
deceased denies that he has oppressed those under him.? But 
these are rather the duties of benevolent consideration than of 
legal right. Egypt is a typical Oriental monarchy, a country 
in which it may be rather said that all classes were rightless 
than that slaves were distinguished from free men by the lack 
of rights. 


5. The history of slavery among the Hebrews is interesting, 
both for the strong distinction made between Jew and Gentile, 
and still more for the progress which we can trace in law and 
custom affecting the position of the slave. According to the 
later law all the Canaanites ought to have been utterly destroyed 
upon the conquest, but this represents an ideal of barbarity 
which there is no reason to think was ever realized, and the 
narrative itself admits as much, especially in the case of the 
Gibeonites, who became “‘hewers of wood and drawers of water.” # 
Whether by capture or by purchase Gentiles clearly became 
slaves, and the law ended by regarding the Gentile as the only 
slave whom a Hebrew ought in strict propriety to hold. Further, 
though the stranger is constantly recommended to considera- 
tion and just treatment, laws for the protection of the slave 


1 Diodorus, i. 76-77. 

2 In another well-known pleading, the soul protests according to some 
translators that he has not caused harm to be done to the servant by his 
chief. This, if correct, is an interesting recognition of a social duty to 
the slave, but the translation is uncertain, and Mr. Griffith renders it : 
a! shy not turned the servant against his master’ (World’s Literature; 
p- 5321). r 

* Further, Solomon levied tribute of bond service upon all the Canaanites 
left, but not upon the Israelites (1 Kings ix. 21). 


CLASS RELATIONS 287 


apparently apply in the main to the Hebrew only. We pass 
_now to the consideration of these laws. 

In the earliest code, the period of service for a male Hebrew 
is limited to six years. ‘In the seventh he shall go out free for 
nothing.’ But the case is contemplated that his master has 
given him a wife, and in that case she, with her children, would 
remain with her master, and he might therefore choose to abide 
also. If so, “‘ then his master shall bring him unto God (that is, 
to the temple) and shall bring him to the door or unto the door- 
post, and his master shall bore his ear through with an awl; and 
he shall serve him for ever.’”’? The Hebrew father might sell 
his children into slavery, and the daughter who had thus been 
sold was not released in the seventh year, as were the men- 
servants; but she might be redeemed, and if not suitably married 
to the son of her master, regain her freedom. As to general 
protection, “If a man smite his servant or his maid with a rod 
and he die under his hand, he shall surely be punished ’’—in 
what way is not stated. The protection given to the slave would 
be more valuable if it were not for the qualifying clauses which 
follow. ‘‘ Notwithstanding, if he continue a day or two he shall 
not be punished; for he is his money.” ? This is chattel slavery 
partially ashamed of itself. The code further provides that 
either a male or female slave should obtain freedom for the loss 
of aneye oratooth. Asin the Code of Hammurabi,‘ the master 
takes the value of the servant when he is killed by another man’s 
ox, the price being fixed at thirty shekels of silver. It is a 
noteworthy inconsistency that retaliation is to be exercised 
upon the ox in this instance—that is to say, it is to be stoned 
to death. But where the ox gores a free man or woman, re- 
taliation can also be exercised upon the master (supposing he 
has been guilty of negligence) unless he can buy himself off. 
The distinction is significant of the true position of the slave as 
a chattel whose price must be made good, rather than as a human 
being for whom retaliation can be demanded. 

The code of Deuteronomy does not make any fundamental 
change in the position of the slave, though here, as in other 
respects, it breathes a more humane spirit. In this code the 
Fourth Commandment reads differently, the remark being in- 
serted, “ that thy man-servant and thy maid-servant may rest 
as well as thou.” ‘The insertion of this considerate reason is 


1 Exod. xx.—xxiil. * 2 Exod. xxi. 2-6. 

8 }xod. xxi. 20. Here the qualification ‘‘ Hebrew ” does not appear, but 
it is perhaps to be understood from its use earlier in the chapter. 

4 Hammurabi, sec. 252. 


288 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


thoroughly in keeping with the character of the prophetic code. 
The Hebrew slave is still to be released in the seventh year, and 
released with gifts. “‘ When thou sendest him out free from 
thee thou shalt not let him go away empty. Thou shalt furnish 
him liberally out of thy flock,” and so forth. ‘Thou shalt 
remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt and 
the Lord thy God redeemed thee.” 

The provisions as to the marriage of the slave to a wife pro- 
vided by his master disappear, and the Hebrew woman is to be 
free as well as the man. Nor is there here any reference to the 
sale of daughters. The man-stealer is (as in the earlier code) 
to be put to death, but apparently only when offending against 
an Israelite ;1 and by a not infrequent inconsistency the fugi- 
tive slave is not to be given up, but “shall dwell with thee, in 
the midst of thee, in the place which he shall choose within one 
of thy gates where it liketh him best. Thou shalt not oppress 
him.’?2 

In the priestly code the most definite change is one which 


in other respects, the code is considerate to the Hebrew slave, 
and indeed denies that he ought to be a bondman at all. “If 
thy brother be waxen poor,” the true duty of the more fortunate 
Hebrew is to uphold him. “As a stranger and a sojourner 
shall he live with thee,’ but if he “sell himself unto thee, thou 
shalt not take him to serve as a bond-servant. As a hired 
servant and as a sojourner he shall be with thee; he shall 
sojourn with thee until the year of jubile.” * 

It is the Gentile—and here is the true spirit of ancient slavery 
—it is the Gentile who is the appropriate bondman. “ As for 
thy bondmen and bondmaids.. . . of the nations that are round 
about you, of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids. 
Moreover, of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among 
you, of them shall ye buy.” ~ “ Over your brethren ye shall not 
rule with rigour.” 

Thus the Levitican code comes as near as possible to the 
abolition of Hebrew slavery. Nevertheless, it lengthens the 
term from seven years to fifty. The explanation of this change 
is probably to be found in a passage in Jeremiah,* from which it 
appears that the provision for releasing the slaves in the seventh 
year was practically, if not avowedly, a novelty in Josiah’s time. 
It is, of course, treated by Jeremiah as having belonged to the 


1 Deut. xxiv. 7. 2 Deut. xxiii. 15. 
3 Leviticus xxv. 35, 39, 40. 4 Jeremiah xxxiv. 


CLASS RELATIONS . 289 


sriginal Covenant; but nevertheless it appears from his account 
that King Zedekiah proclaimed this liberty as a new thing, 
doubtless in accordance with the recently promulgated code of 
Deuteronomy; and that, while it was temporarily obeyed, a 
relapse very speedily followed for which punishment by pesti- 
lence and famine is proclaimed. It would seem, therefore, that 
the law of Jubilee, while probably of ancient date and a survival 
of communal tenure so far as regards land, is applied to slaves in 
the hope of rendering the benevolent intentions of Deuteronomy 
a practical reality. 

( In any case, regarded as a whole, the development of Hebrew 
aw and custom in relation to slavery is an interesting example, 
on the one hand, of the amelioration of the slave’s position by 
a distinct touch of humanitarian sentiment; and, on the other 
hand, of the persistence, owing to the dominance of an exclusive 
national religion, of the deep distinction between the domestic 
slave and the foreign. 


\ 

6. India.—In India, slavery was already known in the Vedic 
age. The institution persisted inthe Brahmanic period, although 
its existence was denied by the Greek travellers of Alexander’s 
time. Whether the Greeks only saw certain districts in which 
slaves were few or were misled by the absence of rural slavery 
is not certain, but the recognition of slavery as an institution in 
the Brahmanic law-books is perfectly clear. Manu distinguishes 
slaves of seven kinds— 


“There are slaves of seven kinds, (viz.) he who is made a 
captive under a standard, he who serves for his daily food, he 
who is born in the house, he who is bought and he who is given, 
he who is inherited from ancestors, and he who is enslaved by 
way of punishment.” 


He proceeds to declare that, like the wife and the son, the 
slave has no property. The wealth which he earns is acquired 
for him to whom he belongs. 


1 The picture of Hebrew slavery would not be complete without a 
reference to the attitude of the wise man in Ecclesiasticus. He bids his 
reader treat a good servant well, and not defraud him of release. This, of 
course, with an eye on the year of Jubilee (chap. vii. 21). Indeed, he 
would have him treated as a brother: “‘ For thou hast need of him as of 
thine own soul.’’ And a more practical reminder follows, which may serve 
‘to help us, too, to understand a factor which must always have tended to 
mitigate the slave’s lot: ‘‘ If thou treat him evil and he run away from 
thee, which way wilt thou go toseek him.” On the other hand, you should 
be severe with a bad servant, and if he be not obedient, put on him heavy 
‘letters. Making a bad servant’s side bleed is one of the list of things of 
\ ae a man ought not to be ashamed (chap. xlii. 5). 


U 


290 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


‘‘ A Brahmana may confidently seize the good of (his) Sudra 
(slave); for, as that (slave) can have no property, his master 
may take his possessions.’ 


Quarrels with slaves are to be avoided. They should be 
treated, Manu says, “‘as one’s shadow.” If offended by them one 
should “bear it without resentment.”! Much more moderate 
rules for their punishment are laid down than by the Hebrew 
lawgiver.? 

But slavery is of very secondary importance in Hindu society 
as compared with caste. It would be out of place here to attempt 
a full discussion of the origin and nature of caste in India. We 
have seen the more elementary forms of the institution in other 
races. In India it reached an altogether abnormal develop- 
ment, which is of more interest for the student of Hindu society 
than for the general history of ethics. Caste did not exist 
in the primitive society of Vedic times, though conditions out 
of which it in all probability arose were already present. ‘The 
Aryans found themselves a conquering white minority among 
the subject dark-skinned population, and the contrast between 
the Aryan and the Dasyu is already deeply marked. “ Varna,” 
the Sanskrit word for caste, means originally colour, and some 
at least of the Sanskrit authorities adopted the distinction 
of colour as their explanation of the origin of the institution.® 
In fact, towards the close of the Vedic age it would seem that 
the institution has taken shape. Jour castes are mentioned in 
the Purusha-Sukta, one of the latest hymns found in the Vedic 
collection :4 ‘‘ When they formed Purusha, into how many parts 
did they divide him? What was his mouth? What were his 
arms? What were called his thighs and his feet?’ The 
answer is that the Brahman issued from his mouth, the Ksha- 
triya from his arms, the Vaisya from his thighs, and the Sudra 


from his feet. The first three, the priests, the iors, and 
the farmers, were all Aryans snd Paice hon eae amen Sudras 
alone were the once-born and the slaves of all the rest. These 
were the four original and legitimate castés. The mass of lower- 
caste men were held to have issued from various mixtures be- 
tween the four original orders. Without attempting here to go 
into the Brahmanic theories of the origin and nature of caste in 
general, or dwelling on this occasion upon the position of the 
Brahman, it may suffice to quote a few laws from Manu illus- 

1 Manu, viii. 415, 416, 417; iv. 185. 

* See above, chap. v. p. 190; Manu, viii. 299-300. 


3 Muir, Sanscrit Texts, vol. i. p. 140. 
4 Muir, i. 156, 157. 


CLASS RELATIONS 291 


trating the position of the Sudra, which tend to show the ethical 
analogy between a caste system and a slave system. 
The Sudra in Manu is as such a born slave. 


“A Sudra, though emancipated by his master, is not released 
from servitude; since that is innate in him, who can set him free 
from it?” 1} 


If a Brahman requires any article for a sacrifice which he 
cannot find handy, “he may take at his pleasure two or three 
articles from the house of a Sudra, for a Sudra has no business 
with sacrifices.” * ‘To kill a Sudra is a minor offence, placed in 
the same list with the cutting down of green trees for firewood, 
neglecting to kindle the sacred fires, superintending mines, 
stealing grain, etc., and the penance for killing a Sudra is to give 
ten white cows and a bull to a Brahman.? On the other hand, an 
assault by a Sudra upon any twice-born man is punished by 
mutilation of the offending limb.*| The defamation of a Brahman 
or an insult to a twice-born man by a Sudra is punished with 
equal severity : “ He shall have his tongue cut out, for he is of 
low origin ’’; while, “if he arrogantly teaches Brahmanas their 
duty, the king shall cause hot oil to be poured into his mouth and 
into his ears.” ® 

For a Sudra to have anything to do with a woman of the 
twice-born caste was a serious offence, but as to marriage with 
a Sudra woman, Manu’s opinion fluctuates. Lastly, the Sudras 
Serve aS scapegoats. “‘O Takman,” says the Atharva Veda, 
addressing the demon who brings fever, “go to the Mujavant 
or further. Attack the Sudra woman, the teeming one, shake 
her, O Takman.”’? The relative values of the lives of men of 
the four castes are summed up. “ One-fourth (of the penance) 
for the murder of a Brahmana is prescribed (as expiation) for 
(intentionally) killing a Kshatriya, one-cighth for killing a 
Vaisya; know that it is one-sixteenth for killing a virtuous 
Sudra.’’§ 

It ought only to be subjoined that the distinction of caste 


1 Manu, viii. 414. 2 Manu, xi. 13. 3 4b., xi. 64, 65, 66, 67, 131. 

4 4b., viii. 279, 280. 5 4b., viii. 270, 272. 

$ Tn one place (iii. 17) the Brahman who takes a Sudra to wife will, after 
death, sink into hell; and other passages equally condemn any relations 
with Sudra women (¢.g. iii. 191, 250). But in other places marriage 
with a Sudra is contemplated, and merely affects inheritance. In ix. 151, 
the son of the Sudra wife is to take one share of the estate as against three 
shares of the son of the Brahman; but in sec. 160, the son of a Sudra is not 
an heir at all. Commentators explain that this is the case in which the 
Sudra wife is not legally married. 

* Duncker, Hist. of Antiquity, vol. iv. p. 281. § Manu, xi. 127. 


292 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


was a matter of some perplexity to moralists, even in the Brah- 
manic age. Among the different accounts of gastes given in the 
Mahabharata some roundly assert that character makes caste. 


Nahusha, who had been. condemned to take the form of a 
serpent, asks Yudhishthira the question: ““ Who is a Brahman, 
and what is the object of knowledge? ’’ Yudhishthira replies : 
‘“The man in whom are seen truth, liberality, patience, virtue, 
innocence, devotion and compassion ’—he is a Brahman accord- 


ing to the religious tradition. The serpent answers, “ But in 


Sudras also we meet with truth, liberality, calmness, innocence, 
harmlessness and compassion, O Yudhishthira.”’ Yudhishthira 
replies: ‘‘ Whenever a Sudra has any virtuous characteristics, 
and a Brahman lacks it, that Sudra will not be really a Sudra, 
nor that Brahman a Brahman. The man in whom this virtuous 
character is seen is a Brahman, and the man in whom it is not 
seen is a Sudra.’”’ The serpent proceeds: “ If you regard him 
only as a Brahman whom his conduct makes such, then caste 
is of no avail until deeds are superadded to it.” Thus pressed, 
Yudhishthira admits the confusion of castes in the actual world, 
and concludes that good conduct and the fulfilment of the pre- 
scribed ceremonies are alike necessary. 


Other passages declared that fundamentally “there is no 
difference of castes. This world, having been at first created 
by Brahma, entirely Brahmanic, became separated into castes 
in consequence of works ”’;? and the speaker, Bhrigu, being now 
asked what constitutes membership of a caste, replies that— 


He who is pure, consecrated by the natal and other initiatory 
ceremonies, who duly studies the Veda, practises the six kinds of 
works, and the rites of purification, who eats of offerings, is 
attached to his religious teacher, is constant in austerities, and 
is devoted to truth, is called a Brahman. He in whom are seen 
truth, liberality, inoffensiveness, innocence, modesty, compassion 
and devotion, is declared to be a Brahman. He who is unclean, 
is addicted constantly to all kinds of food, performs all kinds 
of work, has abandoned the Veda, and is destitute of pure 
observances, is called a Sudra.® 


/Here we have an ethical doctrine of equality, or—which is 
the same thing—of distinction by merit alone, strictly in line 
with the teachings of Buddha, in whose Order there was no 
thought of caste, and for whom the true Brahman was he who 
lived the perfectly pure and holy life. 


1 Summarized from Muir, Sanscrit Texts, vol. i. p. 133-138. 
2 Muir, i. 140. ’ Summarized from Muir, i. 142. 


CLASS RELATIONS 293 


7. China.—iIn China, a tradition is preserved of an epoch at 
which there was no slavery, and in the classical book of poems, 
the She-King, there is little that points definitely to the exist- 
ence of the institution in its strict sense. Few prisoners were 
taken at that time, and therefore it was very possible that 
slaves were also few, but the evidence appears clear that slavery 
did exist in the Chow Dynasty.1. The institution is certainly 
ancient, and even at the present day general, although no 
doubt far less important than in some other countries. Debt 
slavery no longer exists, and in the pacific land of China war has 
ceased to be a source of supply; but the slave-trade is general,” 
and the sale of daughters by their parents, and of wives by their 
husbands, particularly in times of famine, is a rich source of 
recruitment of the slave class. Kidnapping is also frequent. 
The slaves, we are told, are generally treated well, and there is 
that social equality between mistress and slave-girls which we 
so commonly find in the East, mitigating the harshness of legal 
institutions. But the protection of the slave is very inadequate. 
Jt is true that the master has not the power of life and death, 
but the punishment for killing a slave is only the bamboo? 
Further, if death is caused by a canonical or legitimate punish- 
ment the man is held guiltless ;* branding, we are told, is but a 
small part of the punishment of a slave for running away,° while 
the slave who strikes his master is liable to death by beheading. 


8. Slavery, like polygamy and divorce, was an institution which 
Mohammed found fully established among his fellow-countrymen, 
which he disliked and set himself to mitigate, but could not 
attempt to abolish. A difference, however, is made between 
Moslem and non-Moslem captives. In a war with Moslems 
prisoners were not enslaved. If the prisoner on the battlefield 
became a Moslem he might not be killed, but according to the 
traditions he ought even to be set free, though if he became 
a Moslem subsequently he remained a slave.6 The holding of 


1 Legge, Prolegomena to the She-King, p. 166 and footnote. In point of 
fact there are passages in the She-King itself which can hardly admit of 
two interpretations (vol. ii. part ii. book iv. ode viii. stanza 3). 

2 Douglas, Society in China, p. 346. 

3 The punishment applies to deliberate murder, or mutilation with death 
as the result, and if the slave is innocent, banishment is added (Kohler, 
cited by Post, Grundriss, i. 373). 

4 If an innocent slave is put to death, his wife and children become free 
(Kohler, cited by Post, Grundriss, i. 372). 

5 Douglas, op. cit., p. 350. 

¢ But according to Hidayah, the conversion to Islam on the battlefield 
did not necessarily save a man from slavery (Hughes, Dictionary of 
Islam, 597). 


294 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


Moslem slaves was not, as such, prohibited, but their emancipa- 
tion was regarded as an act of special merit. According to the 
tradition : ‘‘ Whosoever frees a slave who is a Moslem, God will 
redeem every member of his body limb for limb from hell fire.’’ 4 
Mohammed sought mitigation of the slave’s lot by ethical rather 
than legal means. ‘The slave has no civil liberty, and can only 
possess property by the owner’s permission. The master’s 
power is unlimited, and he is not slain for the murder of his 
slave. He has unlimited power over his female slaves; as a 
matter of law he may prostitute them; he may give a slave in 
marriage to whom he will, though he may not annul the marriage 
when once completed.2, On the other hand, the Prophet en- 
joins upon Moslems to exercise kindness to slaves, forbids the 
prostitution of slave-girls as a religious offence, and enjoins 
emancipation whenever a slave is able to redeem himself. 
‘““ When a slave of yours has money to redeem his bond, then 
you must not allow him to come into your presence afterwards.”’ 
‘‘ Behaving well to slaves is a means of prosperity, and behav- 
ing ill to them is a cause of loss.” “Whenever any one of 
you is about to beat a slave and the slave asks pardon in the 
name of God, then withhold yourself from beating him. Feed 
your slaves with food of that which you eat and clothe them 
with such clothing as you wear, and command them not to 
do that which they are unable.” Wrongful punishment, 
which, in some institutions, as we have seen, is a legal ground 
of manumission, was held by Mohammed to be a moral ground. 
‘““He who beats his slave without fault or slaps him on the 
face, his atonement for this is freeing him.” As an illustration 
of the spirit in which this behest was conceived, we may quote 
the story of the Caliph Othman, who, having twisted his 
memlook’s ear, bade the slave twist his own.* <A further 
humane provision forbade the separation of mother and child: 
‘Whoever is the cause of separation between mother and child 
by selling and giving, God will separate him from his friends on 
the day of resurrection.”’ # 

Conversely, the Prophet had certain promises for the dutiful 
slave: “‘It is well for a slave who regularly worships God and 


1 Hughes, Dictionary of Islam, p. 597. 

2 If a slave-girl has a child by her master she becomes free at his death, 
while, if the child be acknowledged by the master, she becomes free there- 
Bae ae 597, 598). 

, 599. 

- Tonk this saying is attributed to Mohammed, it is said by Tabir that 
‘‘ we used to sell the mothers of children in the time of the Prophet and 
of Abu Bekr but Umar forbade it in his time ” (Hughes, 599). 


CLASS RELATIONS 295 


discharges his master’s work properly’; and again: ‘“‘ When a 
- slave wishes well to his master and worships God well, for him 
- are double rewards.’ On the whole, the authorities tell us that 
the Prophet’s rules of good treatment are observed. Masters 
are bound to maintain their slaves or emancipate them. To 
sell a slave of long standing is considered disgraceful, and female 
slaves are seldom emancipated without being provided for. 
The Egyptian slaves in Lane’s time were numerous, but well 
eared for, and ranked socially above free servants. With all 
these mitigations it must be admitted that the recognition of 
_ the slave traffic by Mohammedanism has been, and is to this day, 
a curse to Africa and a source of disturbance to the world’s 
politics. 


9. Greece.—Like the Chinese, the Greeks had a tradition of a 
prehistoric epoch in which there were no slaves But in the 
Homeric epoch we find slavery in full swing, and the regular 
issue of the capture of a town is that the men should be slain 
and the women enslaved. Hector knows—and no thought is 
so bitter to him—that when Troy is taken and he himself is 
slain, it will be Andromache’s fate to be a bondwoman to one 
of her conquerors. Her family had already suffered the same 
fate. The swift-footed, godlike Achilles had destroyed her 
father and her seven brothers, and had carried off her mother 
“with the rest of the spoil,” though he afterwards set her free 
for an immense ransom. Now, Hector was all these to her, but 
the day would come when the Argives would sack the sacred 
town of Ilium and Hector in his turn be taken from her, and it 
would be her lot to fall into slavery.2 Apart from legitimate 
warfare, piracy—which, for that matter, was in the Homeric 
view hardly less legitimate—was a frequent source of slavery. 
Many children suffered the fate of Eumeus the swineherd, 
and were carried off by the pirate and sold across the wine-dark 
sea. Slavery was hereditary, and the slave might be sold or 
put to death, as the faithless female slaves were hanged by 
Telemachus.2 On the other hand, slaves might own houses and 
property of their own and live in the practical freedom in which 
we find the goodly Eumeus. Lastly, it should be noted that 
the slaves were not the only rightless class, for the stranger is 
also outside the protection of the law, though, even if a beggar 
and a fugitive, he is under the shelter of Zeus so long as he is a 
guest and claims the right of hospitality. 


1 Herodt., vi. 137; Busolt, Handbuch, p. 11. 2 Jliad, vi. 414-495. 
8 Odyssey, xxii., Tr. Butcher and Lang, p. 374. 


296 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


In the rural districts of Greece slavery remained rare. 
Pericles lays stress on the fact that the Peloponnesians are 
autourgoi—cultivators of their own lands.1 It is even said that 
slave-holding was forbidden in Phocis and Lokris down to the 
fourth century.2. But in the more developed states the growth 
of wealth meant, as always in the ancient world, increase in the 
number of slaves and—what was most fatal—the belief that 
work was not compatible with the dignity of a free man. 
Slavery remained a recognized fate for prisoners of war as an 
alternative to massacre, and even Plato could only hope that 
Greeks would abandon the practice of enslaving fellow-Greeks, 
restricting themselves to the barbarian, who, as Aristotle held, 
was the only natural slave. But through the institution of debt 
slavery the poorer classes in each state were frequently menaced 
with falling into enslavement. Before Solon’s time the land 
was tilled by poor cultivators for the rich, and on their failure 
to pay five-sixths of their produce to the landlord, they fell 
into the position of serfs along with their wives and children. 
The prohibition of debt slavery and the pledging of the person 
by Solon was thus the salvation of civil freedom for Athens; and 
with the progress of Athenian democracy, although it was a 
democracy of free men only, the position of the slaves was 





indirectly improved. The master had the right of corporal 


punishment and of branding, but could not put a slave to death 
without a judicial decision.? A right of action for t@pis protected 
the slave from ill-treatment by strangers, and if maltreated by his 
master he could take refuge in the Theseum or some other asylum 
and demand to be sold—a demand which was investigated either 
by the priests or by a judicial process. On the other hand, the 
slave was not directly recognized as a personality by the law; 
he could only be represented by his master, who could sue for 
damages on his account. Except in murder cases he could only 
give evidence under torture, to which he might be given up at 
the will of his master, the belief being that this was the only 
way to get truth from him. He could only give evidence against 
his master upon a charge of treason. At the same time, he 
was often allowed to hold property and found a family, while 
he might buy his freedom by entrusting his earnings to a priest. 
Manumission was frequent and the hope of it used as a stimulus 

1 Thucyd., i. 141. 2 Busolt, p. 12. 

% This held in other states as well (see Isocrates, Panath. 181, in 
Busolt, p. 12). In the Laws (ix. 856) the slayer of his ownslave is to undergo 
a legal purification corresponding to that imposed on the unintentional 


homicide of a free man, and incur no further penalty. For a case in which 
the killing of a slave might be treated as murder, cf. 7b., 872. 


CLASS RELATIONS 297 


to industry, but the freedman retained a semi-dependent 
condition and had no political rights unless enfranchised by a 
special statute like that of Cleisthenes.+ 

The development in the Dorian states was somewhat different. 
Here serfdom was more prominent than slavery, though the 
two institutions existed sometimes side by side. The Dorian 
conquerors divided part of the land among themselves, leaving 
it to be tilled by the conquered people as public serfs,? while 
part was left to its original possessors, who were personally free 
but had no political rights. Hence the two classes of Helots 
and Perioeci. The conquered population were bound to the soil, 
but could not be sold or set free except by the state, though 
the landlord, for whom they cultivated the land at a fixed rate, 
was their immediate master. The Helots of Sparta, as is well 
known, were seditious, and were ill-treated and frequently put 
to death in fear, or at least in anticipation, of some rising. The 
Penestae of Thessaly, who were otherwise in a closely analogous 
position to the Helots, were better off in this respect, as they 
could only be put to death by judicial process. In Crete there 
were two classes of serfs, those on the public land and those 
belonging to private owners, who might contract a legal marriage 
and hold and inherit property, and, according to Aristotle, 
were treated by masters on terms of social equality. Besides 
these classes of serfs there were slaves who might be bought 
and sold. 

It should be added that the distinction between the citizen 
and the non-citizen is strongly marked throughout Greek history. 
In principle the alien has no status of his own. He requires 
a@ mpogevos—the official successor of the host who protects his 
guest —to represent him. Aliens were forbidden at Sparta 
altogether, and at Athens, where their numbers became great, 
they were as such destitute of rights, but in practice, on inscrib- 
ing themselves on the list, they came under special state pro- 
tection, for which, and for the right to exercise a trade, they paid 
a certain tribute. They still required a representative in a law 


1 Zimmern, pp. 356-358; Wilamowitz, p. 37. Slaves often carried on 
trade or business and must then have had a large measure of practical 
freedom (Wilamowitz, p. 120). On the other hand, the conditions in the 
mines of Laureion were admittedly abject (Zimmern, 394-396). 

The intervention of the god—Apollo was especially active—in manu- 
mission illustrates the precarious nature of the slave’s “rights.” If he 
offered money to his master for his freedom, the master might take the 
money and refuse the freedom. Hence the precaution of depositing it 
with the god, who then carried through the trust (Farnell, Cults, iv. 179). 

2 But in some cases also as serfs to private masters, e.g. at Sparta 
(Wilamowitz, p. 37), 


298 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


court, and had neither the right of marriage with citizens, unless 
by treaty with their own state, nor the right of holding land. 

The organization of the city state, in fact, led naturally 
to a deeply marked distinction between the full citizen and all 
others, whether Greek or Barbarian, whether free or unfree. 
And we may take it as a mark of the ethical superiority of the 
Greeks that the logical consequences were so far mitigated, as 
we see them to have been in the legislation for the protection 
of slaves. 


10. Rome.—At Rome the strict limitation of civil rights to full 
citizens, combined with the peculiar development of the powers 
of the paterfamilias, had a depressing effect upon the position 
of slaves. Not only captured enemies, but, even down to the 
time of Justinian, any unprotected foreigner was liable to en- 
slavement. A free Roman could not become a slave within 
Rome itself, but deserters, and all those who were omitted 
from the census, could be sold abroad by the magistrate, children 
by their parents, debtors by their creditors, the thief by the 
injured party. | 

In practice, the slave of the earlier period was, as a rule, fairly 
well treated, and there was probably no great social distinction 
between him and his master; but he was in law a chattel. He 
had no family of his own; his union (contuberniwm) was no 
legal marriage. He had no status in a court of justice, but if 
he wished to sue for an injury could only do so through his 
master. Hven if abandoned by his master he did not become 
free, but was the lawful property of the first comer. Not that 
cruel treatment passed without condemnation. Cruelty, even 
to animals, was subject to religious and even legal penalties.? 
Gross cases might involve the intervention of the censor. Though 
the slave could legally hold no property, custom secured him 
his own peculiwm, and he might even come to purchase his 
freedom. 

Such was the position of the slave in early Rome. The 
growth of the Roman dominion, the rise of the great estates, 
submerging the old freeholder with his small plot of ground, 
and the facility of obtaining slaves from the numbers thrown 


1 Busolt, pp. 12-14, 15, 68, 119. Cleisthenes, however, enrolled many 
HeToixo: among the citizens, and mixed marriages became frequent until 
the conditions of the citizenship were tightened up by a law of 451. After 
this, left-handed marriages with aliens obtained, the wife having a status 
below that of an Athenian but above a concubine, and the children being 
personally free (Zimmern, pp. 333, 334). i 

* Girard, Manuel, 89, 91. | 


CLASS RELATIONS 299 


into the market by capture in war and by traffic with pirates, 
combined to give Roman slavery towards the close of the 
‘Republic a new and dark character. The land was cultivated 
in many districts by slave-gangs, working in chains and confined 
by night in prison-workhouses under conditions described by 
Mommsen as such that by comparison with their sufferings it 
is probable that all that was endured by negro slaves was 
but a drop. But some relief came from the humaner ideas of 
advancing civilization, fostered by contact with Greek culture. 
_In particular, the Stoic philosophy was the champion of the 
slaves. Seneca vigorously pleads their cause, and in particular 
reprobates the cruelty of the gladiatorial games. The jurists 
of the next century went further, and distinctly laid down that 
by natural law all men are equal and that slavery is a human 
institution contrary to nature. ‘‘ Quod ad jus naturale attinet, 
omnes homines equales sunt,’ writes Ulpian;! and more 
distinctly Florentinus: ‘‘ Servitus est constitutio juris gentium, 
qua quis dominio alieno contra naturam subjicitur.”* The 
Stoical teaching had its effect on legislation. The practice of 
the exposure and sale of children and of pledging them for 
debt was forbidden, while an edict of Diocletian forbade a 
free man to sell himself. Man-stealers were punished with 
death. The insolvent debtor was no longer made a slave. The 
right of bequest was granted to slaves. Some approach was 
made to a recognition of their marriage, not only after emanci- 
pation, but even? while in slavery, with a view to hindering the 
separation of families. Some legal security had already been 
given to their personal property, the peculium, by the preetorian 
edicts. The Lex Petronia (perhaps of a.p. 19) forbade throwing 
a slave to the wild beasts without a judicial decision. Under 
Hadrian the power of life and death was taken from the master, 
and under Antoninus Pius the master who killed his own slave 
sine causa was punished as a homicide. An edict of Claudius 
had meanwhile enfranchised the old or sick slave who was 
‘abandoned by his master.® Under Nero the slave had been 
given the right to complain of ill-treatment to the magistrate. 
Under Pius the slave who was cruelly treated could claim to be 
sold, and by a special refinement it was held cruelty to employ 
an educated slave on degrading or manual work. Constantine 
deprived masters who abandoned new-born slaves of their rights 
over them. Emancipation, though restricted by Augustus, 


1 See Girard, p. 92. 2 See Girard, p. 88, note 1. 
3 Assez timidement, Girard, p. 94. 4 Girard, p. 94. 
5 Loc. cit. $.46., p. 95. 


300 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


was again made easier, and though the use of torture at judicial 
investigation remained, it was in some respects limited.t 
While the legal position of the slave was being thus improved 
by the imperial legislation, a new form of serfdom was growing 
up under the name of the Colonate. Some of the Coloni were 
probably foreign captives and immigrants settled upon the soil, 
while others were originally free tenants, who lapsed into a 
semi-servile condition through the insecurity of the times and 
largely through self-commendation. The status of the Coloni 
was regulated in the fourth century for fiscal purposes. Under 
Constantine, in 332, the Colonus could not quit his holding nor 
could he marry off the property of his lord. On the other 
hand, he could not be disturbed or be subjected arbitrarily to 
increased charges, and as the status was hereditary, we have 
here a fully developed predial serfdom with fixed but limited 
rights for the serf.2 The master might inflict moderate chas- 
tisement, but the Colonus had a legal remedy for injury or 
excessive demands. While the Colonate was partly recruited 
from the previously free peasantry, a compensating process was 
going on whereby rural slaves obtained a settlement upon the 
land as quasi-Coloni or Casati. They were assimilated to the 
Coloni by the law of Valentinian I. in 377, could not be sold 
apart from the land, and by the end of the seventh century were 
merged in the Colonate.* 
f We have now reached a point in the history of slavery at 
f which two fresh influences have to be considered. The first of 
| these is the barbarian conquests ; the second that of the medieval 
_ Church. The German tribes, generally speaking, recognized 
chattel slavery, and slaves were recruited from the sources 
ordinarily recognized among barbarians— war, unprotected 
strangers, voluntary commendation, and in certain cases debt 
(¢.e. in cases of incapacity to pay the wergild. This was the 
only form of debt slavery known).® Even in Merovingian times 
the slave was a true chattel, whose life had indeed a price, but 
a price payable, like that of the Babylonian slave, to his lord, 
and not a fixed wer like a free man, but a sum proportionate to 


1 Ingram, History of Slavery, 60-64, etc. 

2 <b., pp. 78, 79, ete. 

5 The colonus could also contract a valid marriage, but he had to marry 
within the domain unless he purchased a dispensation. The right of punish- 
ment was conceded to the master for certain specified faults (Letourneau, 
DL’ Esclavage, pp. 422, 423). 

4 Ingram, History of Slavery,.p. 80; cf. Viollet, Histoire du Droit Civil 
Francais, p. 312. Valentinian prohibited their sale apart from the land. 

5 Schréder, Lehrbuch, p. 46. 


CLASS RELATIONS 301 


his value: But besides the slaves, who were not numerous, 
the Germans recognized a class of imperfectly free men, the 
Liti, who had land of their own, without which a German could 
not be a citizen, but were in a dependent position. Their 
status varied very much from tribe to tribe, and from one 
period to another. At first tributary to the people, we find 
them at a later stage in subjection to an individual master. 
They took no part in the meetings of the people, and while 
originally they could plead before a court, their wergild was 
ordinarily half that of a free man. Their marriage with free 
people was a mésalliance, wherein the children followed the rank 
of the mother. As we approach the “ Frankish” period we 
find their position more distinctly assimilated to that of serfs.? 


11. Thus the Middle Ages begin with two fairly distinct classes 
of the unfree ; on the one hand, the slaves proper, whose position 
has been ameliorated in Roman law, but remains that of pure 
chattels by the law of the conquerors; on the other hand, a 
class of serfs in various degrees of unfreedom, which had already 
‘grown up in the later ages of the Empire and was reinforced by 
the corresponding class of Liti among the conquerors. 

The moral influence of the Stoic philosophy which had in- 
spired the imperial legislation for the benefit of slaves was now 
replaced by that of the Church. Like the Stoics, the Church 
accepted slavery as an institution which it did not seek to abolish, 
but it was so far influenced by the philosophic idea of natural 
equality that it set itself to minimize an evil which it could 

ot cure. ‘There was, indeed, one distinction which in the event 

ecame a distinction of importance. The Stoic philosophy 
was strictly universalist in charactier. For the Stoic all men 
were brothers and there was no distinction of nationality, class, 
or creed. For the Church all men ought to be brothers, but 
many men were, unfortunately, unbelievers, and the brother- 
hood of men was for many purposes limited to members of the 
Church. Thus it followed naturally from Christian principle 
that the holding of Christians in slavery, and still more the 
reducing of Christians to slavery by capture or by purchase, 
were actions which, if not wholly illegal, were contrary to 
the best religious teaching. Accordingly, from an early period 
the custom of enslaving prisoners of war began to be abandoned, 


1 Schréder, p. 346. The price was, however, becoming a fixed tariff, 
and so gradually approximating to a true wergild (b., 218). 

2 Schréder, pp. 50, 51, 221-223. In the latter period their position 
still varied very greatly as between different peoples. 


—— 
> ea 


302 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


at any rate in war between Christians, while the Church further 
set itself energetically to combat the traffic in slaves The 
custom of treating the slave as a fixture on the estate, which in 
the Empire had been made matter of legal enactment, was first 
adopted by the West Franks among the barbarians, and spread 
from them to other peoples by degrees.? The prohibition to 
enslave captives is treated by Gregoras as the traditional law 
“not only of the Romans and Thessalians, but of the Ilyrians, 
Triballi and Bulgarians on account of the unity of faith.” 
But as this prohibition did not apply to pagans, until the conver- 
sion of the Slavs it left them as the one source open to the 
Western European countries for the acquisition of fresh slaves 
whether by capture or by traffic. The interval before their con- 
version lasted long enough, and this source of slaves was during 
that time sufficiently important to alter the European name 
for the institution. The former “servus ”’ was now accurately 
represented in medizeval and modern language by the “serf”’; a 
“Slav” was, with slight modification, in German, French and 
English, a ‘“‘slave.”’* As the Slavs became converted to Chris- 
tianity this source of recruitment for the slave class was cut off.. 
There remained debt slavery, the sale of wife and children by hus- 
band and father, and the sale of a man by himself in time of need. 
All these sources of slavery remained in the earlier Middle 
Ages,° but they were already in process of decay. Self-enslave- 
ment was a desperate resource to which men were only driven 
in times of great need, and probably became infrequent in 
proportion as a more settled order made years of famine rarer ; 
and the downfall of free men tended rather to swell the class 
of serfs than of slaves. The sale of men was on the whole opposed 
by the Church,® and debt slavery was also limited under religious 
influences. From the Carolingian age onward it became limited 


1 Forexample, the Bristolslave trade was suppressed by Wulfstan, Bishop 
of Worcester, towards the close of the eleventh century. It had been 
prohibited previously by Ethelbert and Canute, and again by William the 
Conqueror. The selling of a countryman beyond the seas was forbidden ~ 
in the “Dooms” of Ina, and the same prohibition, so far as Christians 
were concerned, in the ‘“‘ Dooms” of Ethelred (Pollock and Maitland, 
i. 85). 

2 Schréder, p. 219. 3 See Grotius, book iil. chap. ix. 

* In addition to possible sources of capture by war there was the slave 
trade in the hands of the Jews (Schréder, p. 459, quoting T. Waitz, 5, ii. 
207). 

> Schréder, p. 220. 

6 For example, at the Council of Coblenz, in 922 (Viollet, 311); and 
Wulfstan again is prominent with protestations against the enslavement 
of “‘cradle children.”” Nevertheless, the Church allowed a man to give 
himself up along with his wife‘and children as slave to an abbey, at any 
rate until he could redeem himself (Schréder, p. 220, note 26). 


CLASS RELATIONS 303 


to a period necessary for the paying off of the debt,1 and thus 
ceased to be a source of hereditary slavery properly so called. 
_ Meanwhile, the Church was also urgent in pressing the claims of 
-manumission. The grounds for this are based on the broadest 
Stoical principle by Gregory the Great, who urges that “it is a 
good deed if men, whom nature created and brought forth free 
from the beginning and the law of nations has put under the yoke 
of slavery, are by the benevolence of a liberator restored to their 
liberty in that natural condition in which they were born.”’ This 
is the full doctrine of human rights applied in somewhat halting 
fashion by way of recommending a beneficent practice. But, 
_however haltingly applied, the moral conception of universalism 
introduced by the Stoic philosophy and favoured with limitations 
by the Church, was in principle fatal to slavery. That institution 
depends, as we have argued throughout, upon group-morality 
and the distinction between man and man. It is suited to the 
genius of primitive religions, whether in the form of separate 
family cults or of national creeds, but it is opposed in spirit to 
any doctrine which teaches that the same moral obligations 
must apply to all humanity alike. The Stoics first preached 
this doctrine with effect in Western Europe, but unfortunately, 
in applying it to the case of the slave, they were hampered by 
their view of the indifference of all outward circumstances, and 
preached that the slave in his slavery could be and should be 
as truly king and lord of himself as the emperor on his throne. 
The slave Epictetus was no less his own master than the 
Emperor Marcus Aurelius. The leaders of the Church accepted 
the principle of human brotherhood, but to them also worldly 
institutions were secondary, because salvation, if obtained in 
this world, was not obtained for this life, but for the life to 
come. They dealt with slavery, therefore, not so much from 
the point of view of the rights of the slave as from that of the 
duties of the master, and limiting their conception of equal 
rights by the principle of brotherhood in Christ alone, they 
took less account of the fate of those outside the Christian 
community. The results are written deep in history. The 
question is always asked how far the abolition of slavery in 
Europe was due to moral, how far to economic, causes. The 
answer appears to be that, so far as regards slavery proper, the 
two factors worked in harmony. The transition to serfdom was 
favoured by the economic situation.2 But the disappearance 


‘See Schréder, 220, compared with 459. 
2 See Vinogradoff, Growth of the Manor, pp. 202-204. A great social 
reform like the abolition of slavery is seldom brought about by moral 


304 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


of slavery is no less distinctly connected with the rise of 
universalism in ethics, first in philosophy and afterwards in 
‘religion. In neither form was the institution of slavery directly 
combated, but the indirect effect, first by ameliorating the 
position of the slave and thereby curtailing the rights of the 
master, secondly by encouraging manumission, and thirdly and 
most important of all by cutting off the sources of supply, was 
that slavery died of inanition, and by the end of the twelfth 
century was almost unknown in Kurope. On the other hand, 
when the Christian world came into contact, a century or two 
later, as a conquering power with non-Christian races, there was 
no moral force at hand to resist the natural result, and new 
forms of slavery grew up. 


12. The history of serfdom in the Middle Ages is more compli- 
cated and obscure, especially as to the causes and progress of its 
disappearance. We have seen a form of predial serfdom already 
growing up within the Roman Empire. We have seen also that, 
in addition to the slave class, the barbarian conquerors introduced 
into the constitutions of Western Europe imperfectly distinguished 
classes of semi-free citizens. All these elements contributed to 
form that great mass of the population which throughout the 
Middle Ages stood between the free man and the slave, and 
whilst slavery, as we have seen, was slowly dying out, serfdom 
for a long time continued to flourish and increase, recruited in 
part from the ranks of the slaves and in part from free men who, 
either by conquest or through economic causes, sometimes even 
by voluntary surrender of their freedom with a view to gaining 
the protection of a lord, swelled the number of the semi-free. 
Thus medizval serfdom represents, on the one hand, a progress 
from slavery, and, on the other hand, a degradation of free men 
which is a not uncommon incident of epochs of unrest and of 
military conquest. It is not within our limits to characterize 
all the different grades of unfreedom which resulted. At most 
a general idea may be given. Serfdom, though not essentially 








agencies alone. It is only when these can take advantage of a favourable 
political or economic situation that they get their way. Hence there is 
always on the surface of things colour for the cynical view that what appear 
to be moral improvements are really due to non-moral causes. But this 
view ignores the cases in which the political and economic forces tend in 
the opposite direction. In modern industry, for example, the circum- 
stances, if we eliminate the moral factor, are eminently favourable to the 
development of a servile system, but every move in this direction has 
constantly been combated, on the whole with conspicuous success, by the 
deliberate efforts of men and women animated by a sense of justice and . 
humanity. 


CLASS RELATIONS 305 


and universally confined to peasants settled upon the land, 
tended in point of fact through the Middle Ages to lose its 
domestic and assume a territorial character. In the Frankish 
Empire the serf was, generally speaking, glebe adscriptus. He 
might not leave his land, while, on the other side, he could not 
be sold apart from the land. He could acquire property, but 
had not complete control of it. He had to perform certain 
definite services to his master, which could not be altered 
arbitrarily, and in the earlier period he required the lord’s 
consent to marriage, at any rate outside the domain, while he 
_had also to pay for securing the lord’s consent. He came under 
the protection of the law, having, as a rule, half the wergild and 
half the fines of a free man. In other respects, the position of 
the serf was extremely different among different peoples. Among 
the Saxons the Liti were a part of the people. Among the 
Frisians, and probably among the Saxons also, they could 
plead in court, and in cases of injury received a part of the wer 
themselves, only one portion going to their lord. Among the 
Lombards, on the other hand, the corresponding class could not 
appear in the courts, and the lord received their wer as though 
they were slaves. Between these extremes there were numerous 
intermediate grades.1_ As the Middle Ages advanced the heaviest 
burdens of serfdom tended to disappear in the Empire. In 
particular, the right to marry was acquired by the serf, and 
here, as has been mentioned in chap. v., the influence of the 
Church was probably decisive. The payment upon marriage, 
however, was continued, at any rate in cases where it took the 
bride off the estate, and in this case it still required the approval 
of the lord—not that the withholding of such* approval would 
invalidate the marriage, but that it would render the parties 
liable to punishment.” The old right of the lord to inherit from 
the serf had been reduced ® to the right to a duty on the inherit- 
ance; and the other restrictions on the serf’s right to property 
were in process of disappearance. His personal tribute was 
converted into a rent upon his holding and his stock, and the 
limitation upon his power to alienate his land into a right of 
pre-emption on the part of the lord. Finally, the growth of 
free cities favoured freedom. The serf, escaping to them, could 
be reclaimed by his master within a year and a day, but from 
that time onwards wasfree. The principle “‘ Air makes free,” — 
that is to say, that the position of a person follows the general 
law of the land on which he is settled and does not depend upon 


1 Schréder, pp. 222, 223. 2 2b., p. 455. 
3 “* Schon in der vorigen Periode’’; Schréder, 2b. 4 Schréder, p. 456. 
x 


306 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


his birth, became adopted in the later Middle Ages and naturally 
tended to emancipation.t 

In France, the conditions of serfdom varied from province 
to province and from period to period.2 A conception of the 
different grades of unfreedom covered by the term may be 
derived from the description given at the close of the thirteenth 
century by Beaumanoir. In one grade the whole property of 
the serf was at the mercy of the lord, who might also imprison 
him at pleasure; in the other grade, the lord could command 
nothing from the serf except a fixed customary sum, though he 
was still the serf’s heir unless the children redeemed the succes- 
sion.? Serfdom had already become rare and had in some 
provinces disappeared. Some serfs gained the right of paying 
a fixed “taille,” and the right of holding and transmitting pro- 
perty were, generally speaking, acquired early. In a medieval 
decision given at Paris the characteristics laid down as dis- 
tinguishing a serf are (1) he cannot marry without the permis- 
sion of the lord, and (2) he cannot give or bequeath goods. The 
second condition was the more general, and the milder form of 
serfdom persisted to the eighteenth century.* 

In England, as elsewhere, serfdom was increasing just at the 
period when slavery was disappearing, and the number of serfs 
was swelled by the merging of different classes, slaves, villeins, 
and even free men, under a single denomination. The serf 
was not, properly speaking, adscriptus glebe, although he passed 
with the manor when it was sold or inherited; but he could be 
moved from place to place and from one service to another at 
the lord’s will,’ and by strict right could be sold, though the 
right was rarely exercised.6 The general characteristics of the 
villeinage were that the villein by birth could not marry his 
daughter without paying a fine, nor permit his son to take holy 
orders, nor sell his calf or horse; that he is bound to serve as a 
reeve in the manor, and that his youngest son succeeds to his 
holding on his death.’ To this it must be added that while the 
serf has full legal rights in relation to third parties, the criminal 
law makes a great distinction between his lord and him. Thus, 
in the Leges Henricr, if the lord takes away the man’s land or 
deserts him in mortal peril he forfeits his lordship, but the man 


1 Schréder, p. 460. On the reaction which began in the fifteenth century, 
and which was due largely to the unfavourable economic position of the 
landless free labourers, see Schréder, pp. 460, 461. 

2 Viollet, pp. 307, 313 ff. 

3 4b., p. 314. £ 4b., p. 315. 

5 Vinogradoff, Villeinage in England, p. 57. 

$204, po tale ? 26., p. 156. 


a om 


CLASS RELATIONS 307 


‘must bear with the lord’s ill-treatment of him for thirty days in 
war and a year and a day in peace. ‘To kill one’s lord is like 
blasphemy and is punishable with death by torture, whereas 
if a lord kills his man without cause a fine will suffice. This 
‘is the “ high-water mark of English vassalism.’”?1. The Norman 
law is more liberal, but still draws a distinction. ‘“‘If a lord 
‘kills his man he shall be punishable with death, if the man his 
‘lord he shall be drawn and hanged, and even if it be by mis- 
‘adventure he shall be punishable with death.’ The lord would 
‘be punished for killing or maiming the villein, but might beat or 
imprison his serf.? 
jj The history of the decline of serfdom in the later Middle 
‘Ages, both in France and England, is not very clear. The 
lawyers who had been unfavourable to freedom down to the 
thirteenth century changed their attitude during that period 
ao the influence of the new ideas of the state as a whole, no 
longer broken up into half-independent feudal territories, but as 
‘a single authority, having equal claim upon all its subjects alike. 
‘That these more enlightened ideas accompanied the improvement 
of social organization was an extremely fortunate circumstance 
for the English serf. In England, as on the Continent, freedom 
might be acquired by escaping from the lord’s jurisdiction, and 
the courts now favoured liberty. Feudal barbarism admitted 
this rough-and-ready method of emancipation largely because it 
‘lacked the means of securing the person of the runaway. With 
‘the growth of the kingly power and the better settlement of 
‘society, this primitive check upon oppression would naturally 
‘disappear, and thus where the ethical conception of freedom was 
‘wanting, the growth of civilization meant the prolongation of the 
‘old bondage and even, as in Russia and Germany, deterioration 
‘in its character. In England and France, upon the other hand, 
‘there was something of the nature of an ethical resistance to any 
‘tightening of the bonds, and thus the development of order had a 
‘beneficial effect on the slave rather than the reverse, for it tended 
‘to encourage the system of money payments as a substitute for 
labour service, and though in theory the serf remained the lord’s 
‘man, yet in practice, in proportion as labour services were com- 
‘muted for a money rent his position became scarcely distinguish- 
‘able from that of a tenant farmer. From whatever causes, 
servile tenure was in fact rapidly becoming obsolete during the 
fourteenth century. One of the latest records we have of the 
‘existence of bondmen in England is in a document in which 


1 Pollock and Maitland, i. 300. 
714d. 4 416, 3 Vinogradoff, p. 131. 





308 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


Elizabeth enfranchises some remaining serfs of the Crown in 
1574, but there were Scottish miners who remained serfs down 
to 1799 and were not particularly desirous of having their 
condition changed. 
Yet elements of servility remain in the position of the labourer. 
The Statute of Labourers in 1348 was passed with the intention of 
preventing workmen from taking advantage of the rise in wages 
due to the depopulation of the country by the Black Death, and 
was the beginning of a series of labour laws which brought the 
labourer into a position Which, as described in Blackstone,” stood 
as follows: (1) The law first of all compels all persons with 
no visible effects to work; (2) defines their hours in summer and 
winter; (3) punishes those who desert their work; (4) empowers 
justices to fix the rate of wage for agricultural labour and punishes 
those who give or exact more than the wages so settled. We 
know that these laws were largely a dead letter. Nevertheless 
they illustrate the attitude of the governing classes. What was 
in practice more important was the Statute of Apprentices (Fifth 
of Elizabeth), which restricted the right to carry on a trade to 
those who had served an apprenticeship, while the operation of 
the Poor Law, especially of the Act of Settlement, tended in 
practice to restrict the motions of the English labourer almost as 
much as regular serfdom would do.? Indeed, had this statute 
beef: rigidly and universally carried out, it would have had the 
effect of fixing the labourer in his parish like a predial serf without 
the right upon the land which redeems the serf’s position. To 
describe its practical operation in these terms might savour of 
exaggeration, yet the historian of the Poor Law declares that 
with this Act the “iron of slavery entered into the soul of the 
English labourer,’’ and those who know the midland or south 
1 This is sometimes spoken of as the latest record, but Professor 
Vinogradoff informs me that this is not absolutely correct. 
21., p. 414. | 
3 In the effort to deal with vagabondage the law has at different times 
come perilously near to re-introducing slavery. A statute of Edward 
VI. ordained that all idle vagabonds should be made slaves, fed on bread 
and water and refuse meat, wear iron rings, and be compelled by beating, 
chains, etc., to do the work assigned to them. This was repealed in two 
years. It is now laid down that slaves acquire freedom by landing in 
England, but this does not affect the right a master may have acquired 
to a man’s perpetual service, and “‘ the infamous and unchristian practice of 
withholding baptism from negro-servants, lest they should thereby gain 
their liberty, was totally without foundation.’’ 'The Law of England will 
not dissolve a civil obligation between master and servant on account of the 
alteration of faith in either of the parties, “‘ but the slave is entitled to the 
same liberty in England before as after baptism; and, whatever service 


the heathen negro owed to his English master, the same is he bound to 
render when a Christian *’ (Blackstone, i. 412, 413). 


CLASS RELATIONS 309 


“country labourer of the present day can see the scar still there. 
Again, Blackstone writes— 


* A master may by law correct his apprentice or servant for 
‘negligence or other misbehaviour, so it be done with moderation ; 
though if the master’s wife beats him, it is good cause of de- 
parture. But if any servant, workman or labourer assaults his 
master or dame he shall suffer one year’s imprisonment and 
other open corporal punishment not extending to life or limb.”’ 


Further, in Blackstone’s time a servant through whose negli- 
gence a fire happens forfeits £100, and in default of payment 
might be committed to a workhouse with hard labour for eighteen 
months. It is not difficult to recognize in these distinctions 
between the rights of master and servant an echo of the law as 
to lord and serf. 
' Nor was the English law altogether free from caste distinctions 
in the earlier part of the modern period. The benefit of clergy, 
which had originally been an immunity claimed by ecclesiastics 
from the secular courts, had been gradually transformed into 
a mere class privilege, whereby educated persons could escape 
punishment for secondary offences. Thus, in the seventeenth 
century the question whether a man would be hanged for larceny 
‘or not depended on whether he could read, unless indeed he had 
forfeited the benefit of clergy by contracting a second marriage 
or by marrying a widow. In 1705 the necessity for reading was 
abolished, and benefit of clergy could thereafter be claimed by 
all persons alike for a first offence in the case of secondary crimes. 
But important distinctions were still made. The offender, unless 
he was a peer or a clerk in orders, was, until 1779, branded in 
the hand and liable to seven years’ transportation. Clerks in 
orders, meanwhile, might plead their clergy for any number of 
offences, and peers had received the same privileges as clerks by 
the statute of 1547. On the other hand, during the eighteenth 
century benefit of clergy was gradually withdrawn from an in- 
creasing number of offences, but it was not until 1827 that it was 
finally abolished, and even then it was doubtful whether the 
privilege of peers fell with it. This question was not settled 
until 1841, when the statute of Edward VI. was repealed, and 
peers accused of felony became liable to the same punishments 
as other persons. 
When it is remembered, further, that the whole administration 
of petty justice and of the preliminary process in graver crimes 
was in the hands of the landed gentry, upon whose estates the 
labouring classes, rendered landless by economic changes, were 


310 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


fixed, as has been shown, by the Act of Settlement; when it is 
further borne in mind that the same justices had the power of 
fixing wages, and that the whole of the working classes in the 
country were always upon or over the verge of pauperism and 
dependent upon the support of the poor law, the control of which 
was substantially in the same hands, it will be recognized that the 
nominal freedom of the English labourer down to the beginning 
of the reform period was a blessing very much disguised, and 
that the reality compared unfavourably with the lighter forms 
of serfdom. The first stages in the progress of the factory 
system made matters even worse. The new demand for child 
labour introduced for a period what was in essence, if not in 
name, a form of child slavery, pauper children being\regularly 
imported in the manufacturing districts as apprentice’, and set 
to work under conditions as to hours and also as to housing 
which would have been onerous even at less tender years. But 
these abuses, when fully realized by the public, were met within 
a period of time which, in comparison with the normal slow- 
ness of reform, may almost be called brief, by a series} of legis- 
lative measures, overriding the so-called freedom of contract, 
and protecting the children from their legal guardians. The 
factory system, in short, reproduced the economic conditions 
under which, in other circumstances, a form of slavery would 
have arisen. And from this result England and the other 
industrial nations with it have been saved by a distinctively 
ethical movement. 

On the Continent the direct manumission of serfs was 
perhaps more frequent than in England. Enfranchisements en 
bloc were common. We even hear of such things being done by 
abbeys. St. Benedict of Aniane, in the ninth century, emanci- 
pates serfs on the land which he receives. Charters were 
sometimes given upon payment to whole villages and by kings 
to whole counties. In 1315 Louis X. invited all the serfs on 
the Crown lands to purchase their liberty, but the price asked 
was too high. A general abolition of personal serfdom was 
demanded by the Third Estate at Blois in 1576, and again at 
Paris in 1614. This was not granted, but the institution was 
quite unknown in many provinces in the seventeenth century. 
It remained in Franche-Comté, Bourgogne, Alsace-Lorraine, 
Trois Evéchés, Champagne, Bourbonnais, La Marche, Nivernois, 
Berry; but the burden was relatively light, and when the Duke 
of Lorraine proposed a money commutation for their services 
in 1711, the serfs who were to benefit by it themselves raised 

1 Ingram, op. cit., p. 93. 


‘| 


f 


CLASS RELATIONS 31] 


objections. The question was raised by Voltaire, and by an edict 


of 1779 Louis X VI. enfranchised the serfs of the royal domain and 


- encouraged general abolition. Serfdom was finally abolished in 


_ France without compensation on the night of August 4, 1789, 


along with the other incidents of feudal tenure. At the same time 
fell the whole system of privileges which had made the nobles 


and the clergy castes set apart from the mass of the people. 


In the German Empire the progress, which we have seen 


going forward until the thirteenth century, was arrested in the 
_ fifteenth, and a reaction took place, leading to the Peasant’s War 
_at the time of the Reformation. Serfdom lingered on, but in 


1719-20 it was abolished on the Crown lands of East Prussia by 
Frederick William I. Frederick the Great attempted to forbid 
corporal punishment and aimed at a general emancipation, but 
achieved little except in Prussian Poland. The liberation of 
the German serf was to come indirectly from the French Revolu- 
tion. Napoleon carried out emancipation in the conquered 
territory, and as part of the general preparation for resistance 
to France, the Prussian statesmen issued an edict in 1807 by 
which the whole population of Prussia was made free by a 
stroke of the pen.1 Serfdom admitting arbitrary exactions and 
corporal punishment remained, notwithstanding the efforts of 
Maria Theresa and her successors, in a great part of the Austrian 
Empire down to 1848. It was abolished in Russiain 1861. The 
emancipation of the Russian serf may be taken as the final 
termination of the enslavement by law, whether complete or 
partial, of whitemen. The later stages of the process in the more 
backward countries were thus clearly deliberate acts of govern- 
ment, based upon general conceptions either of human rights or 
of the conditions of social well-being. And on the whole the 
continental serf gained something through the delay. Emanci- 
pated in England more by economic causes than on ethical 
principles, he tended to become a landless labourer, more abject 
in some relations than a serf with defined rights. On the Conti- 
nent, in most countries, he retained his land, subject to servile 
restrictions, and when the ethical movement struck off his 
chains, it left him a free peasant cultivator. In England his 
practical freedom was to be won at a later date and at the cost 
of a depletion of the rural districts, which is raising the agrarian 
problem in a form elsewhere unknown. So much depends on 
the nature of the causes determining a change like that from 
servitude to freedom, however great the inherent importance of 
the change itself. 
1 Ingram, op. cit., pp. 119-129. 


312 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


“13. The abolition of slavery and serfdom in the modern world 
/ may, from one point of view, be described as a process whereby 
/ the obligations of group-morality were extended so as to cover 
| all Christians, or, at any rate, all white Christians. Unfortun- 
ately, this result is not the same thing as a strictly universalistic 
morality. As long as the Christian communities lived in isola- 
tion and did not come into touch with weaker races as their 
conquerors, the matter was not one of any very practical moment, 
but when, with the discovery of a new world and the circum- 
navigation of Africa, a fresh economic position arose, making 
slave labour industrially advantageous, while at the same time 
a vast black population was put at the disposal of the far stronger 
white man, slavery grew up again in a new and, in some respects, 
a more debased form. It is worth noting, as illustrating the 
ethical principle involved, that the old Roman slavery had 
never entirely disappeared. In the eleventh century we find 
Gregory VII. exacting from Demetrius of Dalmatia a promise not 
to sellmen. ‘There was a slave trade with Mussulmans in Venice 
and in Sicily right through the medieval period. In the twelfth 
century slaves were sold at fairs in Champagne, and Saracen 
slaves were found in the south of France in possession of a bishop 
at that period.1. Though the French law in the sixteenth century 
recognized that no slave could exist on French soil, the maxim, 
as formulated by Loisel, is applied to those who enter France 
only upon their being baptized. But these smouldering embers 
of slavery were now destined to burst out into flame. The 
Portuguese began importing negro slaves in 1442, and obtained 
a bull sanctioning the practice from Pope Nicholas V. in 1454. 
The reason was characteristic. A great number of the captives 
had been converted to the Catholic faith, “‘ and it is hoped that 
by the favour of the divine clemency, if this process is continued, 
the nations themselves may be converted to the faith, or at any 
rate the souls of many from among them may be made of profit to 
Christ.”’? In fact, the hope—probably the quite sincere hope— 
of saving souls paralyzed, to say the least, the protest which 
would otherwise have been made against what was in essence a 
revival of one of the worst features of barbarism. It was quite 
a logical exception made by Pope Calixtus III. in 1456, when 
he prohibited the enslavement of Christians in the East, and 
by Pius IT. in 1462, when he severely blamed Christians who 


1 So at Narbonne and in Provence in the thirteenth century, and in 
Roussillon down to its annexation by France. A Saracen was publicly 
sold in 1296 (Viollet, pp. 329, 330). 

2 Viollet, p. 330. 


CLASS RELATIONS 313 


enslaved negro neophytes. When Columbus shipped 500 Indian 
“prisoners to Spain to sell as slaves, the law of the case was 
‘investigated by Isabella, and, theologians differing in their 
view, she finally ordered the Indians to be sent back to their 
homes.1 Meanwhile, in the New World the Spaniards were 
making slaves freely of Indians and treating them with great 
cruelty. Las Casas, impressed with the horrors which he saw, 
was struck with the idea that negroes would endure that bond- 
age without sinking under it, and with the most benevolent 
intentions gave the most unfortunate advice that residents in 
‘Hispaniola should be allowed to import negro slaves.2. Regular 
black traffic accordingly began, notwithstanding successive 
efforts made by the Popes, when they grasped the situation, to 
suppress it. All the great trade nations of Western Europe 
joined in the traffic, and must share the blame alike. Europe 
itself was not preserved whole from this scourge. In England, 
indeed, it was held in the case of the negro Somerset (1772) that 
English soil emancipated, but this doctrine, which had been good 
law in France in 1571, was suspended in 1716 and again in 1738. 
Slaves became common, and were even sold at Paris down to 
1762. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century the Popes 
themselves had Turkish galley-slaves, and Louis XIV., besides 
these, had Jewish slaves and Russian captives.* 

‘This second slavery was put down by a distinctly ethical move- 

ent. It began with the Quakers in the seventeenth century. 
George Fox had already desired the Friends in America to treat 
their negroes well, and “that after certain years of servitude 
they should set them free.” In 1727 the Society declared that 
slavery was not an allowed practice. In 1761 they excluded 
from membership all concerned in it, and in 1783 formed an 
association for liberating negroes and discouraging the traffic. 
The Pennsylvanian Quakers had condemned it from 1696 
onwards. Many leading names in English thought are quoted 
in Dr. Ingram’s History as opponents of the slave trade from 
the end’ of the seventeenth century to that of the eighteenth. 
Among them are Baxter, Steele, Pope, Cowper, Day, Hutcheson, 
Wesley, Whitefield, Adam Smith, Johnson and Paley. An 


1 Ingram, 142, 143. 

2 ** Which advice,” says Las Casas himself, “‘ after he had apprehended 
the nature of the thing, he would not have given for all he had in the world ” 
(Ingram, 144). 

3 e.g. The Bull of Urban VIII., 1537, and of Benedict XIV., 1741 
(Viollet, p. 331). 

4 Viollet, p. 332. The position of slaves in France and her colonies was 
minutely regulated by the Code Noir of Louis XIV., 1685. 


314 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


English Committee for the abolition of the slave trade was 
formed in 1787, and the motion for abolition, which was defeated 
in the House of Lords in 1794, was carried under Fox’s premier- 
ship in 1807.1 The French Revolution had gone further. In 
1791 the old principle that the French soil emancipates was re- 
asserted by the Convention, and in 1794 slavery in the French 
colonies was abolished by decree. But the moment was ill 
chosen, as Hayti was in revolt, and Napoleon restored slavery 
in 1802. At the Congress of Vienna, British influence was active 
in obtaining the consent of other nations for the suppression of 
the slave trade, and France acquiesced, in the treaties of 1814 
and 1815. The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society was 
founded in 1823, and secured Abolition ten years later. Slavery 
was abolished by France in 1848, by Portugal in 1858, by the 
Dutch in 1863, and by Brazil in 1888. The founders of the 
United States had been opposed to slavery and attempted to 
exclude it by the Constitution, but were defeated by the opposi- 
tion of South Carolina and Georgia. An Abolition Society was 
formed in 1774 and reconstructed by Franklin in 1787. The 
Northern States adopted measures for abolition between 1777 
and 1804, and importation was prohibited by the United States 
in 1807. An Anti-Slavery Society was founded in 1833, and at 
the cost of civil war emancipation was proclaimed in 1863.? 
Unfortunately, the legacy of slavery remains in that racial feeling 
which is the greatest unsolved problem of the American Common- 
wealth, and which does not become less serious as the negro 
population increases and extends its borders. 


14. Slavery is no longer admittedly practised by any white 
nation. On the other hand, the problem of dealing with coloured 
labour has not been yet satisfactorily solved. Here and there 
‘* forced labour ’’ has been allowed, and forms of contract labour 
are common, which, to say the least, are difficult to keep free from 
every servile taint. The questions raised by the various forms of 
contract allowed by the British and other civilized governments 
since the abolition of slavery belong, however, rather to the con- 
troversies of the moment than to the historical study which is the 
object of the present work, and I do not propose to discuss them 
here. It may, however, be allowable to say that the modern 
tendency to the concentration of wealth, or at least of the forces 
directing labour in a few hands, taken in conjunction with the 
vast reserves of cheap labour to which access has been given by 


1 The trade had been abolished by Denmark in 1792. 
2 Ingram, 154-182. 


CLASS RELATIONS 315 


the opening-up of China and the African continent reproduce in 
very essential features the conditions out of which great slave 
systems have arisen in the past, and the temptation to utilize 
the cheap and relatively docile labour of a weaker and perhaps 
a subjugated race against the well-organized battalions of the 
white artisans, is one by which leaders of industry, being human, 
cannot fail to be attracted, and therefore raises possibilities 
which no statesman can ignore. 

The result of this brief review is to show that the principle of 
the equality of all classes before the law can hardly be said to have 
been accepted by the Western world as a whole before the revo- 
lutionary period. The whole structure of medizval society had 
been based upon the principle of subordination and was moulded 
in the spirit of caste. Confronted at all times with the doctrine 
of Christian Brotherhood, and, later on, with the principle of 
natural equality, this structure was also undermined by the 
growth of industry and the complex forces, ethical, political, 
and economic, which transformed the feudal kingdom into the 
organized state. Under these influences slavery proper dis- 
appeared, as we have seen, in the course of the twelfth century ; 
and in the most advanced nations serfdom followed it in the 
period between the thirteenth century and the sixteenth. But 
for the completion of the work fully two more centuries were re- 
quired. In the less advanced countries serfdom itself lingered on 
into the nineteenth century. In France, though caste privileges 
grew more and more out of harmony with the spirit of the time, 
they could only be destroyed by arevolution. In England, where 
they were rather a practical consequence of political superiority 
than the express subject of legal enactment, they yielded later, 
but more peacefully, to the influences of the Reform period. So 

' modern is the change whereby law and public institutions have 
turned towards equality rather than subordination as their ideal. 
An ideal such equality must, perhaps, always be. Wealth and 
influence will always have their weight, not only in social life, but 

\in the business of government and even in the administration of 

\justice. Yet the true spirit of caste is gradually being reduced to 
shadow of its former self. Expelled by slow degrees from the 
phere of law and government, it has been left to amuse itself 
ith a mock kingdom in the region of ceremonial and social 
intercourse, in which the ghosts of bygone realities keep up 
mock state for the amusement of the philosopher. 

_ As long as class, racial, and national antagonisms play a part 

yin life we cannot say that group-morality has been altogether 

/ overcome. Nevertheless, the evolution sketched in the present 








316 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


and preceding chapter is of no small significance for ethics. At 
the outset men are organized in small groups bound to mutual 
aid and forbearance, while they are indifferent or hostile to out- 
Siders. There is no organic bond uniting humanity as a whole. 
Hence the captive enemy and, in principle, unless there are 
special reasons to the contrary, the peaceful stranger are “ right- 
less.”’ But by degrees a wider conception of obligation arises. 
Fellow-Greeks, co-religionists, fellow-white men, ultimately 
fellow-men, enter the circle to which obligations apply, and even 
the violence of conquest is limited by the rights attaching to 
the conquered as human beings. The “ group’”’ is thus widened 
till it includes all humanity, at which point group-morality dis- 
appears, merged in universalism. But the rights first recognized 
are those of the person. To take into account the rights of the 
organized community is a further step, following logically from 
the first, no doubt, but following slowly. Here, too, we recognize 
a slow advance in the civilized world, an advance which, if un- 
impeded, would finally overcome the “‘ group-morality ”’ of nations 
in favour of a true internationalism of morals and law. 

Turning next to the internal composition of the community, 
we saw that the primitive group was relatively small and homo- 
geneous. But as society grows divisions come, and a new form 
of group-morality arises—distinctions of high caste and low caste, 
bond and free, and the like. In engendering, accentuating and 
maintaining these distinctions, military conquest, economic in- 
equalities, religious differences, race and colour antipathies, have 
all played their part, and up to the middle civilization social divi- 
sions probably tend to increase rather than diminish. Combated 
by the teaching of the higher ethical and religious systems, they 
have been mitigated and in large measure overcome in the 
modern world. Most tenaciously maintained where the “colour 
line’ is the outward and too visible symbol of deep-seated 
differences of race, culture, character, and tradition, they are 
countered even here by the fundamental doctrine of the modern 
state that equal protection and equal opportunity are the birth- 
right of all its subjects. Thus, though the colour line is the last 
ditch of group-morality, here too in the modern period, taken as a 
whole, Universalism has made great inroads. With the improve- 
ment of communication and the growth of commerce, Humanity 
is rapidly becoming, physically speaking, a single society— 
single in the sense that what affects one part tends to affect 
the whole. This unification intensifies the difficulties of ethics 
because it brings into closer juxtaposition races and classes who 
are not prepared by their previous history to live harmoniously 


CLASS RELATIONS 317 


together. Hence it is not surprising that law and morals do not 
'show a regular, parallel advance. Nevertheless, the upshot of 
the evidence here reviewed is that, ethically as well as physically, 
humanity is becoming one—one, not by the suppression of differ- 
ences or the mechanical arrangement of lifeless parts, but by a 
widened consciousness of obligation, a more sensitive response to 
the claims of justice, a greater forbearance towards differences 
of type, a more enlightened conception of human purposes. 


CHAPTER VIII 


PROPERTY AND POVERTY 


ip 1. AMONG primitive peoples there is comparatively little scope 
f 


| 


or the institution of private property. Apart from land and its 
produce, of which we shall speak later, such peoples possess little 


| which can be appropriated, except theirsmall personal belongings. 


: These, it would seem, belong to the individual from the first. 
- Indeed, tools and weapons are so completely identified with their 
owner that they are very frequently buried with him or destroyed, 


in the one case that he may use them in his future life, in the 
other because, as belonging to a dead man, they are regarded as 
dangerous and are therefore best done away with. Now the 
recognition of individual property in personal belongings and of 
personal or communal property in land and its produce may 
both be explained as resting on one and the same principle—the 
principle of occupation and use. It is the individual who actually 
carries and handles the spear or fishing-net, the family or the 
tribe which actually occupies and hunts over the land. But we 
must also allow for the influence of sacral conceptions. ‘Thus, 
among the Kunama, Dr. Tylor remarks that a hedge may be 
mended by a cotton thread. That would certainly not do in 
the civilized world. But then the civilized man does not fear 
that death will follow from a breach of the fence as a magic result. 
In Oceania,? where taboo reaches its extreme development, it 
is freely used for protection of property, real and personal. In 
ancient Babylon boundary stones were secured by an impreca- 
tion 3—that is to say, a curse was laid upon them which would fall 
on those who should remove them. The heap of stones which 
Jacob and Laban set up were to be witnesses between them, and 
it is possible that here, too, the power to punish the transgressor 
was conceived as lying within the stone itself; while at a later 
stage, in accordance with the regular development of religion, 
the curse was laid upon him who moves the stone by Yahveh. 
When we read of the Western Eskimo, whose honesty is highly 
praised by travellers, that other people’s goods left about 
with a stone placed over them are quite secure, we can hardly 


1 Tylor, Contemp. Review, April 1873, p. 704. 
* Ratzel, History of Mankind, vol. i. p. 285. 3 Maspero, p. 762. 


318 


PROPERTY AND POVERTY 319 
_ avoid wondering whether this is due to simple honesty of 
_ character or to the magic qualities of the stone. 
_f The rights of property stand on much the same footing as 
five rights in early society. When simple peoples are described 
f as dishonest it is generally because they steal from strangers or 
outsiders. But this is only an illustration of the general principle 
_ that strangers have no rights, except in so far as protected by 
the law of hospitality. Thus, among the Red Indians, the guest 
was safe while under the roof of his host, but might be freely 
robbed on the prairie.1 Within the community property is, as 
a rule, respected.2 There are, indeed, exceptions. Thus among 
the Nagas,? in some tribes theft is punishable by fines, beating, 
and even death, but in two of the tribes it is not considered dis- 
graceful at all. In some peoples successful theft is held as 
by no means dishonourable.. The case of Autolycus has been 
referred to in chapter i. Among some of the Eskimo theft, 
when discovered, is merely held a clever trick;* among the 
Balantes in Africa it is held honourable, while among the Kaffirs 
the children of chiefs may steal within their own tribe.2 Even 
in some civilized or semi-civilized communities, as at one time in 
ancient Egypt, we find a recognized organization of theft under 
constituted authorities, who duly restore the property to the 
owner on payment of a portion of its value.6 But in general 
the difference between early and developed law is that the former 
treats theft rather as an injury to be avenged, the latter as a crime 
to be punished. This is illustrated by the distinction between 
the “manifest ’’ and the “ non-manifest ”’ thief—that is to say, 
between the thief taken in the act and the thief who has got clear 
away.’ ‘The owner, surprising the thief in the act of carrying 


1 Waitz, vol. ili. pp. 129, 130. 

2 Cf. Schoolcraft-Drake, vol. i. p. 222. ‘“‘ Theft is very scandalous 
among them since they have no locks but those of their minds to preserve 
their goods.”’ (From Coldan’s account.) Among the Dakotas pilfering by 
women and children was common, but the men despised it as too low a 
practice for them (7b., vol. i. p. 206). 

® Godden, J. A. I., xxvi. p. 174. 4 Waitz, vol. ili. p. 309. 

5 Post, Afrik. Juris., vol. ii. p. 83. Similarly there was a class of privi- 
leged thieves in Ashanti. 

6 In Abyssinia thieves are organized under a chief who pays tribute 
(Post, loc. cit.). Waitz (vol. ii. p. 218) mentions that in some parts of 
Africa the thief keeps half of what he steals. For the organization of 
thieves in Egypt, see Diodorus, i. 80, 1. 

7 See Pollock and Maitland, vol. ii. p. 497. Instances of the “ receiver” 
being vested with ownership of movables occur in contemporary Africa 
(Post, Afrik. Juris., vol. ii. p. 162). On the Congo, according to Waitz (loc. 
cit.), secret theft is held slavish, but open robbery lordly, and he states that 
the Kaffirs generally condemn theft, but admire it when cleverly executed 
(op. cit., 401). 


320 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


off his goods, will naturally attack, and will very likely kill him. 
If so, who, on primitive principles, can blame him? But if he 
does not come up with the thief, but finds out the robbery in 
cold blood, then he ought to control his vindictive feelings, and 
be thankful if custom allows him to get restitution, with perhaps 
something more, for his pains. In early English law, the thief 
caught red-handed could be hanged without opportunity of 
self-defence before an impromptu court. But an action for 
robbery, even in the twelfth century, involved only a double 
restitution. Inthe Book of the Covenant, “‘if the thief be found 
breaking in and be smitten that he die, there shall be no blood- 
guiltiness for him. If the sun be risen upon him, there shall be 
blood-guiltiness for him.’’ The owner should not let the sun rise 
upon his wrath. The thief must merely make restitution. If 
the stolen animal is alive he shall pay double, if he has killed or 
sold it “‘he shall pay five oxen for an ox, and four sheep for a 
sheep.”’* The Moors, on the other hand, at the present day do 
not punish theft by night, but only by day, and then only when 
the thief is caught in the act. It is clear that in such distinctions 
as these the law takes account, not of the right and the wrong of 
the case, as we should conceive it, but merely of the degree of 
resentment natural to the man who is wronged and of the manner 
in which he may be expected to appease it. Clearly, wherever 
the thief is allowed to keep a part of the stolen property, or 
has simply to make restitution, stealing can hardly be con- 
sidered a wicked act in our sense of the term, and even where 
restitution is double or manifold, we must regard it as rather 
intended to satisfy the injured party than as a punishment of 
the wrong-doer.* 
f On the other hand, there are also many cases, even in the 
/ uncivilized world, where theft is severely punished, not only by 
' fines, which are a form of manifold restitution, but also by beat- 
ing, Gndtavenente: mutilation, humiliating exposure, and even 
death. Indeed, as soon as public punishments arise, it is 
generally punished with great severity. Thus, in England, an 
action for robbery, which only involved double restitution in 
the time of Glanvil, who died in 1190, was punished by death 
and mutilation in the time of Bracton, who died in 1268,° and 
a little while later death was the invariable penalty, even in 
1 Pollock and Maitland, vol. ii. PP. 494 and 579. 
2 Exod. xxii. 1-4. 3 Post, Afrik. Juris., vol. ii. p. 85. 
ike rnpeer is @ very common penalty in Africa (Post, Afrik., Juris., 
p 


° Instances of all these in Africa (Post, loc. cit.). 
® Pollock and Maitland, ii. 494. 


PROPERTY AND POVERTY 321 





‘the end for the theft of a shilling; while smaller thefts—petty 
Jarceny—were punished by whipping, pillory, or by the loss of 
an ear, and on repetition by death.1 
f Socially, by far the most important question of property con- 
€erns what in modern phrase is called the ownership of the means 
of production. The man, the household, the clan, which com- 
mands the instruments and opportunities of providing for the 
jmaintenance of life is economically free. He who has to use 
the property of others is, so far, dependent, and it is this depen- 
dence which is the centre of the modern social problem. Now 
‘in all societies the land is one of the essential means of production, 
but in a high economic development the plant erected on the 
land becomes equally or more important. In the lowest grades, 
on the other hand, where the instruments of tillage are very 
‘simple, or where there is no tillage at all and the only weapons 
‘required are those of the chase, where a rude shelter can be put 
up anywhere for the night and there is no important accumu- 
lation of personal belongings, the land is the only means of pro- 
duction that need seriously be considered. He who has access 
to the land has, if he be able-bodied, the means of maintaining 
himself. The question of the evolution of property in its earlier 
phases, then, is the question of land ownership. 
How, then, is land owned in primitive society ? The evidence 
vailable is of the same kind that we find in other departments. 
ere is the history of civilized society and the indications to be 
erived from its most archaic institutions, indications which in 
this case have given rise to lively and prolonged controversy. 
‘There is, secondly, the mass of custom observable among con- 
emporary societies of the lower culture, which, as evidence for 
istorical development, may be used provisionally with the 
ustomary cautions. Unfortunately, this evidence itself is by 
no means free from ambiguity. It does not enable us to state 
in universal terms that either the communal, the individual, or 
any other principle flourishes exclusively at a given grade, and 


1 In Rome the Law of the XII Tables—like most laws of that stage— 
distinguished the thief caught in the act—the fur manifestus—from the 
thief not caught in the act—the fur nec mantfestus. The latter must make 
double restitution, the former is punished corporally—in the case of 
robbery by night or with the strong hand, by death; in other cases by 
beating and slavery. In the later legislation the injured party had choice 
of a new form of criminal action whereby corporal punishment might be 
inflicted, or of the actio furti which carried infamia and double or quadruple 
‘Testitution (Girard, pp. 392-394). In the Code of Hammurabi, both 
death and restitution are recognized (sections 6 and following). Manu 
prescribes fines, corporal punishment and mutilations for thefts of various 
kinds (viii. 319 ff.). : 

~~ 


322 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


what it has to teach can only be educed by careful and elaborate 
comparisons. 
Among hunting peoples as a whole our authorities most fre- 
uently deny any individual and family ownership of land. 
Thus, among the Thompson River Indians there was no private 
land. Even the territory of the band was not held exclusively 
but was common tribal property. But it must not be supposed 
that the tribal territory was a mere no man’s land. On the 
contrary, though the related Shushwaps might be allowed on 
it, trespass by any one else might be punished with death. 
Further, game was divided among the hunters, and a rich kill 
generally among the fellow villagers... The tribe, then, exercises 
true exclusive ownership as against all outsiders except certain 
connected people whom it tolerates, and knows of no internal 
divisions. This is true tribal property and is a by no means 
infrequent institution. 
/ Very often, however, land belongs in common to a section 
fof the tribe, a clan, or a local group. Thus, among the Central 
Australians, while each tribe has its known and definitely marked 
area, Within it each local group is similarly the collective owner 
of a defined portion. This portion is not further divided but is 
free to all its members to dwell in or to hunt over as they will, 
trespass by an outsider being strongly resented, and the bounda- 
ries being habitually preserved. Moreover, in this case we can 
find something of a sacral basis for the right of property, for in 
strictness it would seem that the land belongs to the ancestors 
of the “‘ Alcheringa ’’ whose souls are deposited at known spots 
in the area, whence they issue from time to time and are rein- 
carnated in living members of the group.2, Among the hunting 
and fishing tribes of the Pacific Coast the clan is, as a rule, the 
landowner. Thus, among the Lkungen Salish, there were twelve 
gentes, each with exclusive rights of hunting and picking berries 
and fishing on a definite stretch of coast or river bank.2 Among 
the Thlinkeets there was tribal, gentile, and family land. Some- 
times the limits are vague and we come nearer to the conception 
of a no man’s land. The very primitive Tsekehne have a tra- 
ditional hunting ground for each band, but the limits are ill 


1 Teit and Boaz, The Jesup Expedition, 1900, p. 293. The only exception 
to communal ownership was that artificial fishing stations and deer fences 
belonged to those erecting them and were hereditable. There are very 
similar rules among the Eastern Shushwap (Teit, vol. ii. p. 572). 

* Spencer and Gillen, 1. 13, 14. 

3 Boaz, B. A., 1890, p. 569., So, too, among the Kwakiutl (Boaz, B. A., 
1889, p. 833). 

* Swanton, R. B. H., xxvi. p. 425. 


—-— — : 


PROPERTY AND POVERTY 323 


defined and they often hunt one another’s land.1. Among the 
Central Eskimo there were no precisely limited reservations. 
Each family might settle where it liked, but visitors from a 
strange tribe would be an exception, and any newcomer would 
have to fight a duel with the risk of being killed in case of defeat.” 
» Not only is the land common to the tribe, clan or group, but 
its products are subject to rules of customary distribution tending 
to equalize the chances of obtaining food, to share superfluity, 
and obviate starvation. ‘Thus, in Greenland, a godsend like a 
walrus or a whale is divided among the whole village, and in 
any case, if there is a famine, the successful hunter must share 
his spoil. So, among the Central Eskimo, the regulations de- 
termining the ownership of game and the obligations of the 
hunter to his village are elaborate. A whale belongs to the whole 
settlement. If food is plentiful a seal is reserved for a man’s 
housemates (usually a joint family), but if scarce its flesh is dis- 
tributed among all the hunt.’ In Australia, the rules of distri- 
bution are numerous and varied. The Wiradjuri divide food 
among the whole community. The Gringai make equal division 
of the game. The Chepara seem to share all the food in the 
‘camp.> Some rules are elaborate and quaint: ‘‘ In the Wotjo- 
baluk tribe ... when a man killed a kangaroo and there were in 
the camp his mother’s brother, an old man, his wife’s parents, 
a@ married man and two young men, he gave the body of the 
kangaroo to the old man, who gave some to his sister’s son who 
was with him; the head and forequarters to his wife’s parents ; 
a leg, the tail and some fat to the married man; and the young 
men had the remainder.’’® 

Not infrequently etiquette prescribes that the hunter shall 
take the smallest, worst, or last portion,’ and it may be that 
while a man feeds his own relations his wife must look to hers 
for support rather than to him. Not only hunting but the 
gathering of roots, berries, etc., may be subject to similar rules. 
Thus, among the Shushwap, the berry picking was carried out 
by the whole tribe under the direction of the chief, and the 
collection then systematically apportioned. Among the Seri 
every man was entitled to support in the first instance from 
his nearest kin but ultimately from the whole clan. It is 


1 Morice, T'rs. Canadian Institute, 1893, p. 28. 

2 Boaz, R. B. E., 1884-5, p. 581. Among the Greenland Eskimo there 
is no private property in land, but no one builds at a place where people 
are already settled without their consent (Nansen, Eskimo Life, p. 109). 


3 Nansen, loc. ct. 4 Boaz, loc. cit. 5 Howitt, pp. 764, 767. 
6 4b., p. 764. 7 e. g. in §.-W. Victoria, 7b., p. 765. 
®& e.g. among the Wolgal, 7b., p. 764. ® Boaz, B. A., 1890, p. 637. 


324 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


not surprising to learn that, if persistently idle, he might be 
ostracized and ultimately expelled. 

So far we have seen the communal principles at work among 
the hunting peoples, the community being sometimes as wide 
as the tribe, sometimes narrowed to the clan or local group. 
But we also find evidence of private property among some of 
the lowest hunters. The most definite evidence concerns the 
Veddas, if it is to be taken as holding of their original condition 
of pure hunters and gatherers. Here Dr. and Mrs. Seligmann 
tell us that each little group has its own definite territory, but 
that within it each individual has his own ground, which is his 
for life and descends to his heirs. It may be alienated only with 
the consent of the whole group, even presents to children or sons- 
in-law requiring the consent of every adult male, so that what 
we may call eminent ownership is collective, while the individual, 
to apply our phraseology, is rather the life tenant.2 Still, to 
this qualified extent, private property in land exists among the 
Veddas. | 
The Kauralaig, a non-agricultural people of the Western 
Torres Straits, also own land in severalty,? but the only group 
of hunters supplying numerous instances of individual or family 
property are the Australians. Here Grey,+ who travelled over 
a great part of West Australia, Eyre,> who knew the South and 
West, and J. D. Lang,® writing of Queensland, all assert individual 
ownership. The subdivision does not seem to accord with the 
Australian habits of life, according to which we always seem to 
find a group, small, but larger than the simple family, roaming 
the country in intimate relations, and often foregathering with 
others in large numbers. It would be true that in parts the 
local group is so small as not to exceed an enlarged family, but 
our authors suggest a more distinct apportionment to individuals 
than this. Some light is thrown on the question by Howitt, 
who relates that, among the Yuin, when a child was born the 
father ‘“‘ pointed out some hills, lakes or rivers to the men and 
women then present as being the bounds of his child’s country, 
being that where his father lived or where he himself was born 
and had lived. It was just the same with a girl, who had her 
mother’s country and also that in which she was born. Besides 
this, the father took the country where his child was born, if 


1 McGee, R. B. E., xvii. 278. 

2 Seligmann, T’he Veddas, pp. 107, 111, etc. 
3 Haddon, Cambridge Hapedition, v. 284. 
a 


Expedition, p. 232. 5 Journal, vol. ii. p. 297. 
8 Queensland (1861), p. 236. 


PROPERTY AND POVERTY 325 


away from his own locality, and the mother took that where 
_her daughter was born under similar circumstances. . . . One 
of the old men of the Wolgal said that ‘the place where a man 
is born is his country, and he always has a right to hunt over it, 
and all others born there had also the right to do so,’ ’’+ 
This is clearly nothing like individual ownership. It is joint 
ownership by any and all who happen to be born in a particular 
district, and it is intelligible if we suppose something like the 
Central Australian belief in the reincarnation of ancestors to 
\be at the back of it. Such a belief would account for certain 
obscure rights of private property noted by Brough Smyth as 
- qualifying the communal tenure of which he was aware in Vic- 
toria,? and would explain the system described by J. Browne? 
on King George’s Sound, where land was possessed by families 
and individuals but hunted over by the tribe (or probably the 
group). It was difficult, says Browne, to say in what the right 
of the owner consisted except that he took the lead in a fight 
to repel or punish trespass. We must suppose local differences 
in Australia, the system in some parts being clearly collective, 
_ but we shall hardly be on safe ground in accepting pure indi- 
_ vidual ownership for the rest. Howitt’s account shows a possible 
source of misunderstanding, for any of the men whom he men- 
tions might and, if asked, probably would have said of the land, 
“It is mine,” while at the back of the system is a conception 
which is neither individual nor collective but more probably 
sacral. Lastly, Browne’s account shows how the individual and 
collective might be blended in actual practice. We shall be on 
the safest ground in supposing some qualification of collective 
by private ownership in considerable tracts of Australia, and 
this constitutes the main exception to the rule among hunting 
peoples that land is the common property either of the tribe, 


local group, or clan. 
: Wien agriculture begins it is generally in clearings that are 
_ very small in comparison with the tribal area.4 Moreover, the 
clearing is temporary. One or, perhaps, two or three crops are 
| taken, and, the first fertility being exhausted, a new clearing is 
jmade. The right of hunting the whole area remains to the whole 
' tribe or clan as the case may be, and though the individual family 

is not disturbed in the tilling and reaping of the land that it has 
cleared there can be no question at this stage of anything more 


1 Howitt, p. 83. 2 Brough Smyth, vol. i. p. 144. 
3 In Dr. Petermann’s Mitieilungen, 1856, p. 446. 
4 Thus, Schoolcraft (vol. ii. p. 188) says that the Dakotas cultivated 
_ from a quarter to two acres per family, and estimates the total area per 
family at 2200 acres. ; 


326 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


than a possessory right, for permanent ownership is of no value? 
Any man may occupy uncleared land or till it, or the apportion- 
ment may be made at the beginning of the season by the chiefs 
or council.2 The harvest may be reaped in common and the 
stores apportioned to each single or joint family. Where tillage 
is separate possession may only last for a few years*or during 
cultivation, the land, if deserted, reverting to the community.® 


1 Thus, among the Dakota, planting on another’s field gave no right to 
the crop (Schoolcraft, ii. 193). Among the Omaha each head of a house- 
hold had a possessory right recognized by the tribe during cultivation, but 
could not sellit (Dorsey, Rk. B. H., 1881, p. 366). Among the Brazilian peoples 
land is the property of the tribe, the boundaries being fixed by magical 
processes, but the possession of the clearings by the small or the joint 
family is recognized as a right (Von Martius, i. 81-83). 

2 Thus, among the Kayans, untilled land is open to any one, but once | 
tilled it passes into private ownership and may be let (Nieuwenhuis, | 
Quer durch Borneo, p. 159). Among the Sea Dyaks a man acquires title to 
land by clearing it. Among the Hill Dyaks only the land near the villages - 
is private, and the plots are assigned by the tribal council so that one road 
serves all. The apportioned land becomes hereditary (Ling Roth, Natives 
of Sarawak, vol. i. p. 419). Among the Ainu, the chiefs are said to have seen 
to the distribution of land (Batchelor, p. 157). Among the Roucoyennes, 
large clearings round the villages are apportioned by lot (Coudreau, Chez 
nos Indiens, p. 127 seq.). Among the Creeks, the right of hunting over the 
tribal land was common to all, but in the neighbourhood of the village the 
community assigned lots to each household according to their desires and 
convenience (Bartram, T'rs. American Ethn. Society, 1853, pp. 37-39). Among 
the Basonge Meno, each village owns a strip along the river bank, the 
harvest going to the families severally (Annales, Series iii. tome 2, p. 26). 
An annual apportionment of this kind is the system described in Tacitus 
(Germania, Xxvi). | 

3 Among the Creeks, each village had a common field divided into patches 
for each family, the harvest was conducted in common, and a certain 
portion was set aside for the common store out of which the needy were. 
supported. Among the Iroquois, the land was the property of the tribe. | 
The harvest was carried out by the joint family in common, and the pro- 
ducts distributed by the women among the different departments; though 
the village did not make a common stock, the obligations of hospitality 
would prevent anybody from going short (Morgan, Houselife, pp. 61-66). | 
Common cultivation and division of the harvest is also found on the Sierra | 
Leone Coast (Post, Afrik. Juris. ii. 172). Sometimes the communism is. 
of a rough and general character rather than a matter of distinct right. 
Among some of the Papuans, for instance, every one is expected to give 
when asked. ‘The people is God,” it is irreligious to refuse anything. 
We see here the borderland between regular communism and the indis-) 
criminate profusion and liberality which are such common characteristics | 
of primitive life (Kohler, Z. f. V. R., 1900, p. 369). The Karaya people - 
tilled the land in common (Verdff. Kénig. Mus., Bd. I. p. 28). Among | 
the Bororo, the work on the plantations was regulated from day to day by 
the chief (Fric and Radin, J. A. I., xxxvi. 388). i 

4 This is common among the North American Indians (Kohler, Z. f. V. R., 
1897, p. 402). 7 

5 e.g. in many African tribes land is only appropriated while in use. 
On the other hand, land often becomes hereditary among the Foulah of | 
Futajallan, among the Mandingos and the Somali, but uncultivated land - 


fo) 


falls back to the community (Post, A. J., ii. 169, 170). | 





PROPERTY AND POVERTY 327 


But as tillage develops and the cultivated land acquires a value, 
it tends to become permanent. The old communal rights may 
now be asserted by periodical redistributions.1 Or, lastly, the 
redistribution may be given up, and the lots become family 
property, but the eminent rights of the community are still 
recognized—for instance, in customs regulating the methods of 
cultivation or forbidding alienation without its consent. These 
rights will also be found surviving in the common pasture, and 
still greater persistence in the common woodland. 

Thus private ownership arises in a very natural manner out 
f de facto occupation. The process would have been better 
iderstood and the field of controversy reduced if the original 
system had not been interpreted by modern analogies. We are 
not to think of the village in the beginnings of agriculture as 
wning its land collectively like a modern corporation. We are 
o think rather of all its members as exercising identical rights 
pon it. Immemorially each man has hunted and each family 
pitched its cabin where it pleased, and for the latter the right 
of temporary possession has always been regarded. A similar 
recognition is extended to the cultivated plot, and where many 
want to cultivate near together, apportionment is made. There 
is no difficulty, for there is plenty of land, and when all are 
satisfied, ““superest ager.’ The waste and the untilled pasture 
remain common. It is only if population begins to press, or if 
the village becomes a tax-paying unit in a kingdom, that artificial 
means of securing fair apportionment suited to the size of the 
family, the contribution of each to the tax, or the capacities of 









In the Code of Hammurabi, it would seem that leaving the land un- 
occupied for three years destroys the title to it as against another person 
who has occupied and cultivated it (clause 30). Among the Khonds, 
occupation seems little restricted yet it passes into ownership, for land 
so acquired may become an object of sale (McPherson, Memorials of Service 
in India, pp. 62, 63). Among the Navahos, we find a transition to private 
property with the passage from the pastoral to the agricultural state. The 
watering places are still theoretically common, but with private ownership 
of land access to them is barred (Mindeleff, R. B. H., 1895-6, Part II. p. 485). 
Among the Washamba, all uncultivated land remains common, but culti- 
vated land had its owner (Steinmetz, p. 267). In the medieval manor the 
pasture was common after the hay was cut, and the waste common at all 
times. Theancient Indian village also had common pasture ground (Manu, 
vill. 237). 

1 As among the Yakuts (J. A. J., xxxi. 74) and some of the Oraons 
(Howitt, J. R. A. S., 1899, p. 336). Elsewhere in India, though the lots 
have become inalienable, the tradition of redistribution remains (Mayne, 
p. 112). On the other hand, in the Russian Mir, the system of periodical 
redistribution is, according to Kovalevsky, an innovation (Modern Customs 
and Ancient Laws of Russia, p. 93, etc.), 


328 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


the plough team, will be set on foot and will take the form of 
periodical redistribution or of the intermixture of strips. But 
the eminent ownership of the community will not be forgotten. 
It will be expressed in the code of custom and the rules of tillage, 
safeguarded by a manorial court, and in the reservation of the 
right of the community to prevent alienation or to Sha on 
the admission of a new settler.! 

But meanwhile another tendency is at work. Land may be 
said to belong not to the community but to the chief. How 
far this is merely nominal and how far real is often difficult to 
‘tell. To the white man the ownership of the chief is as convenient 
\as it is harmonious with its preconceived views, for the chief can 
be got to sell, and the establishment of his title is then a matter 
of practical importance. In effect, we must suppose the chief’s 
power to have varied from that of a representative figure-head 
to that of administrator with restricted powers, and from this 
» upwards to the position of a feudal lord.? Finally, the differen- 
_ tiations characteristic of material civilization appear, and we 
_ have a class of nobles owning the land and of peasant cultivators, 
_ serfs or semi-free, cultivating it.? 
| Whis differentiation, which is of even more fundamental im- 


1 e.g. in early medieval Germany (Schréder, Lehrbuch der Deutschen 
Rechtsgeschichte, pp. 207, 208). 

2 Among the Warega, land is said to belong to the villagers in common, 
represented by the chief (Delhain, p. 203). Among the Bahuana, Torday 


and Joyce tell us that land belongs nominally to the chief, but really to the © 


community (J. A. J., xxxvi. 284). So among the Singpho (Wehrli, J. A. #., 


xvi. 34). Among the Thlinkeets, the gentile land was vested in the chief — 
(Boaz, B. A., 1889, p. 832), and among the Tolowa, Powers (pp. 65, 66) tells 


us that each chief inherits a portion of the coast on behalf of his band. 


But the chief may be the authority to whom a would-be cultivator must © 


apply, e.g. among the Warundi (Buszt, p. 469) and the Bageshu (Roscoe, 
J.A.JI., xxxix. 193). Among the Yoruba, the tribal land is vested in 
the chief, who allots it to the householders according to their requirements, 
and it becomes hereditary and inalienable. Finally, the land may really 
be the property of the king or nobles under him, and be let out to the 
cultivators, for labour service or rent in kind or money—in fact, upon a 
feudal tenure or a leasehold system. Something like this obtains among the 
Somali (Paulitschke, ii. 44) and the Maguindanaos (Ausland, 1891, p. 889). 

Among early civilizations ancient Egypt supplies an illustration of the 
cases in which all land belonged in theory to the king. In fact, it was owned 
in severalty, and might be farmed under contracts to pay a proportion 
of the harvest to the owner (Griffiths, Papyri, iii. 23, 156). The king 
had practical expression in the imposts and the corvée, and, on the other 
side, the duty of his representative, the nomarch, to feed the people in time 
of scarcity. ‘I gave bread to all the hungry of the Cerastes Mountain,” 
says the nomarch Henku (5th Dynasty, Breasted, i. 126), and the boast is 
frequently repeated. 

3 e.g. among the Igorottes (Petermann, Hrgbd, 1882, p. 31) and the 
Tscherkessen (Bodenstett, p. 204). 


PROPERTY AND POVERTY 329 


aie than the transition from communal to private ownership, 
since it implies the formation of a class of landless dependents, 
hardly appears in the lowest economic grades. We find traces 
of it in the fishing tribes of the Pacific coast, where, for instance, 
among the Thlinkeets, certain clans held land of their own while 
others had to resort to the tribal land or wait till the owners were 
“through ’’ with them for the season.1 Among the Carriers, 
Chilcotin, and Western Shushwap, the ownership of the land was 
confined to the nobles.2, We may compare the Guaycuru hunting 
tribes, which compelled the Guana to till the fields for them.® 
With these exceptions we hear hardly anything of a landed 
nobility till we come to the second and higher stages of agriculture. 
Then, when we compare our figures we find a remarkable result. 
The cases in which communal ownership is the preponderating 
custom, individuals and families being occupiers if anything, 
decline pretty continuously from the hunting tribes to the higher 
agriculture. But there is no corresponding rise in cases of 
individual ownership, which remains nearly constant through the 
agricultural stages. ‘The deficiency is made up by the increase 
in the cases of ownership by chief or nobles, and with this we see 
that the way is prepared for the class distinctions of civilization.® 
Lhe lesson is reinforced by the growing frequency of the instances 
in which land is let for a consideration.® 
But while the communism of the village gradually wastes away, 
there is also a communism on a smaller scale which forms the 
economic basis of the joint family. The joint family consists of 
a whole group of relations connected by father-right or mother- 
right, as the case may be; the property of this group is generally 
administered by the head, but is owned and its produce shared 


1 Swanton, R&. B. H., vol. xxvi. p. 425. 

2 Morice, T'rs. Canadian Institute, p. 28. Other families might hunt the 
land by permission (id. Proc. Can. Inst. vii. 125). Among the Western 
Shushwap the nobles collected rents from the commons and fined and drove 
them off for trespass. Among the Eastern Shushwap land was tribal 
property (Teit, Jesup Hxped., ii. 572, 573). 

3 Serra. Riv. Trimensal, 2nd Serie, vii. 206 ff. 

4 The main exception is that, owing to the ambiguity of the Australian 
evidence, there are more clear cases of common ownership among the Higher 
than the Lower Hunters. 

5 Simpler Peoples, p. 251. The development among the Pastoral peoples 
is less regular, but among the Higher Pastoralists the ownership of 
chief or nobles appears in a large proportion of the few cases which are 
known. 

$ For one or two cases among fishing tribes, see above, note 2. The 
loaning of land in return for the first year’s profits was common in the 
Kastern Torres Straits, and occurred occasionally among the less advanced 
people of the Western islands (Haddon, Cambridge Hxpedition, vol. iv. 
p. 147, and vol. vi. p. 165). 


330 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


| by allincommon.! It is in strictness indivisible and inalienable. 
It can neither be sold, given away nor bequeathed. But 
within this communistic scheme we find private property 
arising in a variety of forms in very different degrees. ‘Thus, 
individual members may acquire a peculiwm on certain con- 
ditions. For example, the daughter, who is allowed to retain 
the savings of her industry and take them away with her on 
marriage as her dowry.? Again, the joint family may break up 
into separate families; alienation may be allowed under varying 
restrictions ;° or, finally, the house-father may acquire so much 
predominance that the common rights are merged in him.* 
The communal system was from the first compatible with. 


1 The position of the head of the family gives rise to much the same 
questions as that of the chief in the tribe. How far is the ownership (a) 
nominal, (b) effective in certain distinct rights of administration, (c) abso- 
lute. As contrasted cases we may put side by side the Baquereue, where 
the family chief is said to administer the common goods (Hurel, Anthropos, 
vi. 285); and the Negritos of Zambales, where he can sell or otherwise 
dispose of the family planting ground (Reed, p. 43). 

2 This appears to be the only form of private property in the Russian 
joint family down to the present day (Kovalevsky, Modern Customs, 
p. 59). Among the Kurds of Eriwan, the wife’s dowry is the only property 
held distinct from that of the family (von Steinen, p. 227). 

3 A strong case is the Hebrew Law of Jubilee by which all land reverted 
to its original owners at the end of fifty years; this in effect provided that 
family property should not be permanently alienable. The proprietary 
rights of the tribe are also maintained in the priestly code by the rule 
prohibiting daughters who, failing sons, have inherited property, to marry 
out of the tribe (Numbers xxxvi.). More commonly a right of re-purchase 
remains where alienation has been allowed. The French right of retrait 
lignager was not finally abolished till 1790 (Viollet, p. 563). 

4 In early Rome the family property was conjoint, but the system was 
much modified by the power of the Roman paterfamilias and also by the 
right of the heirs to demand partition at the death of the father. There was 
also probably a wider primitive community of land as between possibly the 
whole people or more probably the gens (Girard, p. 249). 

For the varying positions of the father in the Indian household, see J. D. 
Mayne, Hindu Law and Usage, p. 222 ff. Mayne makes the distinction 
between the patriarchal and the joint family turn on the question 
whether on the death of the eldest ascendant the family do or do not 
remain together (p. 223). He points out that under the patriarchate all 
acquired property fell to the father. In this stage the head of the house- 
hold acquires private property indeed, but at the expense of all the rest. 

In early Greece, land was the common property either of the community 
or of the tribe or gens. Common ownership would seem to have survived 
in the hills and woodland, and in respect to mineral rights. Private land 
was at Sparta inalienable and therefore really the property of the family, 
and in Attica alienable but subject to closely defined laws of inheritance, 
and to supervision by the law as against waste. The division was accom- — 
plished by the middle of the seventh century in Attica. But it must be 
remembered that there was everywhere in Greece a race of original 
cultivators, who either became helots or more or less dependent on the new 
lords (Wilamowitz-MOllendorf, 61, 62, 82). 


PROPERTY AND POVERTY 331 


inequality, for one family would be stronger and more numerous 
than another, and as soon as accumulation began and the practice 
of destroying the property of the dead gave way, inequalities 
would be cumulative in their effect. Redistribution, or the 
simple liberality of private manners,! will merely be occasional 
and clumsy brakes upon a prevailing tendency. The clamour for 
ys avadacpds, of which we hear so often in Greek history, was 
more an assertion of old quasi-communistic ideas than of revolu- 
tionary innovation. The communal disposition of lands acquired 
by conquest offered the Romans repeated opportunities of 
counteracting the monopoly of ownership by the rich, and from 
the Licinian Rogations to the Gracchan revolution, and from the 
Gracchi to the settlement of the veterans after the civil war, was 
the focal point of social convulsion and political revolution. 
Given private property and inheritance, there is no difficulty in 
accounting for inequality. The difficulty which every civilization 
has had to face, and our own most of all, is that of stemming the 
tide. But how the inequality of shareholders in a village was 
transformed into the relationship of lord and vassal is a more 
difficult question, and the answer is probably different in different 
cases. Political and fiscal causes co-operated with the indus- 
trial factor. The rich man might become a chief, or the chief, 
primarily indistinguishable in mode of life from his followers as 
we so often find him, might become a rich man. In the pastoral 
stage in particular, flocks and herds might be accumulated to 
great size, while a pest or a drought might reduce individuals to 
the status of proletarians. When villages grew into kingdoms or 
were subordinated to a conquering clan, governors were appointed 
to be responsible for order and taxes, and these might either be the 
old headmen, whose position would thus undergo a great change, 
or followers of the conqueror, or other members of the ruling 
race. The new ruler would have lands apportioned him for 
maintenance, and labour service secured to him that he might 


_ be free to maintain his dignity and perform his public functions. 


By some such steps as these the Teutonic village seems to have 
grown into the medizval manor, in which every man, lord and 
vassal alike, holds his property not absolutely but subject to the 
performance of customary service. The commutation of personal 
service for rent brought the mass of the English cultivators to 
the most favourable position that they have ever enjoyed, but it 


1 Among the Roucoyennes no one has any difficulty in finding sustenance 
on the land of another family while his own clearing is getting ready 
(Coudreau, op. cit. 241), and in British Guiana a village whose crops fail 
lodges itself upon another (im Thurm, op. cit. p. 253). ; 


332 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


was a precarious and, as it proved, fleeting prosperity. For the 
indefiniteness of unwritten custom left them at the mercy of the 
lord when it became his interest to enclose, and the transformation 
to, absolute ownership by the minority meant the total loss of 
ownership by the greaternumber. The social questionin England 
which the Industrial Revolution must in any case have raised 
in an acute form, was rendered almost desperate by the contem- 
porary dispossession of the peasant cultivator, and the first half 
of the nineteenth century found the mass of the English people 
at the lowest depth of economic depression. 

/ Meanwhile, land has long ceased to be the only important means 
/ of production. From the beginnings of pasture, and with the 
/ application of animal power in agriculture and transport, stock 
. .became an important factor in wealth. The rise of industry, 
¥ commerce, and the consequent formation of towns established 
| classes of artisans and merchants, who gradually abandoned the 
\ cultivation of land and lived by manufacture and exchange. 

, Capital lent itself more readily to absolute ownership, exchange, 

and free bequest than land, and capital, which becomes more and 
more a mere paper lien on the industry of others, occupies the 
larger share in the economic life of the advanced community. 
It is in the accumulation and use of capital that absolute owner- 
ship displays its full power, and that the contrasts of gigantic 
accumulation and utter destitution are most dramatically dis- 
played. Speaking very roughly, we may say that humanity has 
hitherto known three stages of economic development. In the 
first, the fruits of the earth are open to all to gather. There is 
general poverty, but also general opportunity. In the second, 
labour, like all social life, is more organized, men have their 
status of master or slave, lord or vassal, superior or dependent. 
There is discipline but not freedom. In the third, while the 
individual is free to make his own career within the limits of the 
social order, it falls out through the working of competition and 
the cumulative factor of inheritance, that there are those who 
have a lien on the fruits of earth in the industry of others, and 
those—and they are the majority—who have none. The man 
of property and the man of none are the contrasted figures of 
modern civilization, and their reconciliation a problem which 
becomes more urgent as industrialism advances. 


2. Private property, held in absolute ownership, produces a 
basis for the free exchange .of goods, and from the exchange of 
‘goods arise commerce, the division of labour and free industrial 
enterprise. In its early stages society seems to know exchange 


PROPERTY AND POVERTY 333 


(only in the very rudimentary form of direct barter. A may 
give his cattle for B’s sheep, or his sword for B’s spear. Each 
object is handed over then and there, and the transaction is, so 
to say, instantaneous. But if a regular trade is to develop, this 
immediate and simultaneous completion of the exchange be- 
comes impossible. It becomes necessary to rely on the promises 
for the future of either one party or both, and thus exchange 
generates contract. But the conception of a binding con- 
tract is not reached at one stroke. To us the moral duty of 
keeping faith may appear axiomatic, and may seem to provide 
a very simple and obvious ethical basis for a legal obligation. 
But early law does not dig down to ethical foundations. Jn its 
primitive form it is wont to recognize no contractual undertaking 
at all as binding for the future. It knows only those which are 
completed immediately on both sides, like a sale or an exchange 
of goods. It is a step onwards when a form is prescribed, the 
fulfilment of which makes the contract binding.? But still it is 
the legal form rather than the ethical element, the promise, 
which has force. 


“That which the law arms with its sanctions is not a promise, 
but a promise accompanied with solemn ceremonial. Not only 
are the formalities of equal importance with the promise itself, 
but they are, if anything, of greater importance. . . . No 
pledge is enforced if a single form be omitted or misplaced, but, 
on the other hand, if the forms can be shown to have been 
accurately proceeded with, it is of no avail to plead that the 
promise was made under duress or deception. The transmuta- 
tion of this ancient view into the familiar notion of a Contract 
is plainly seen in the history of jurisprudence. First, one or 
two steps in the ceremonial are dispensed with; then the others 
are simplified or permitted to be neglected on certain conditions ; 
lastly, a few specific contracts are separated from the rest and 
allowed to be entered into without form, the selected contracts 
_ being those on which the activity and energy of social intercourse 
depend. Slowly, but most distinctly, the mental engagement 
isolates itself amid the technicalities, and gradually becomes the 
sole ingredient on which the interest of the jurisconsult is con- 
centrated. . . . Forms are thenceforward only retained so far as 


1 See Schréder (p. 63) for the Primitive Germans “ wie alle Naturvélker.”’ 
Post, Grundriss, vol. uu. p. 617 seg. Girard, Manuel, p. 417, on early 
Roman Law: “ Nuda pactio obligationem non parit.”’ 

2 For the form of the Roman Nexum, see Maine, Ancient Law, p. 320. 
The oath or the ordeal are common forms ; for instances, see Post, loc.cit. A 
more substantial guarantee is the requirement of a deposit as among the 
Chinese (2b., p. 619). 


\ 


334 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


they are guarantees of authenticity and securities for caution 
and deliberation.” 1 


/ Once recognized as fully binding in morals and law, the im- 
/portance of contract as an element in social life increases with 
/every step forward in civilization. At the outset its scope is 
narrowly limited by the social structure. As long as the old 
grouping remains by which a man has a fixed place as member 


‘of a clan, a joint family, a village community, he is scarcely free 


to enter into obligations upon his own account. He cannot 
bind himself without binding others, and so obligations must be 
entered into, if at ail, between communities rather than indi- 
viduals. Hence the part played by voluntary contract in life is 
insignificant. Again, in the earlier civilizations, rules of caste, 


- or the inherited obligations of feudal tenure, fix each man’s 


a 


place and function, and greatly curtail his opportunities for 
entering into voluntary relations with other men. As these 
barriers, one after another, break down, there arises a new 
mobility in the social world. Instead of fellow-clansmen, or lord 


/ and vassal, bound to each other by hereditary and unalterable 
# ties, we have merely fellow-citizens, who have no special ties but 
‘those which they form for themselves, who come together for 


mutual aid and, if not pleased with each other, can separate 
again. ‘The old solid structure of society, in which each atom 
was definitely bound to its neighbours, has deliquesced into a 
mass of freely-moving molecules. The process is completed in 
the modern world by the comparative ease with which the last 
barrier —that of the state frontier —is overleapt. Capital 
migrates with perfect freedom, human beings almost as easily in 
proportion as alien laws have ceased to be oppressive, and the 


same broad civic rights are recognized in all the advanced 


nations. In the new structure of society it is more and more 
true that the whole world is open to the individual, though it is 


_ also true that he is in a sense alone in its vastness. 


3. Free contract and private property are the foundations of 
civilized economics, but they bring their own problems in their 


1 Maine, Ancient Law, p. 313. 

For stages in the development from the nexum to the consensual contract, 
see Maine, op. cit., p. 338. Maine points out that the moral element first 
enters decisively into the Real Contract where part performance or one-sided 
performance imposes the duty of fulfilment. Several civilized peoples 
recognize a right of one-sided retractation, at any rate within a certain 
limit of time. Thus Manu, viii. sections 222, 223. According to Post 
(loc. cit.) the law of Islam originally gave a right of retractation holding until 
the parties had separated. The ancient Babylonian seller could re-purchase 
by repayment with interest, and his family had a similar right (2.). 


PROPERTY AND POVERTY 395 


train. At once the cause and effect of the breakdown of the 
old social groupings, the accumulations of wealth which they 
render possible bring about new divisions, new contrasts, new 


antagonisms. On this side, in all the more virile races their 
work has been combated stoutly, if not always wisely, by the best 
citizens and often by the religious leaders. The old communal 
rights are furbished up anew, as in the Sabbatical year and 
the later year of Jubilee. The prophets thunder against those 
who grind the face of the poor. Exactions threatening serious 
diminution of the roll of citizens are met by the abolition of 


_ debt slavery, by a general cancelling of debts, perhaps by a 


division of lands. In particular, usury is denounced as unnatural 
by the philosopher or as wicked by the prophet. Religion con- 
secrates poverty, or inspires attempts at a deliberate communism. 
Yet, after all, antiquity has handed on the problem unsolved 
to the modern world, and not only unsolved but replete with 
difficulties more formidable in proportion as the emancipation 
of the individual is more complete and the forces at the com- 
mand of industrial, commercial or financial genius immeasur- 
ably greater than at any previous epoch. The sense of these 
difficulties has deeply affected modern legislation. There are 
few countries in which contracts in industrial matters are left 
wholly unregulated. In England in particular, we have a vast 
mass of industrial legislation, dating back at least to the Factory 
Act of 1802, restricting in numerous directions the agreements 
which may be made between employer and employed. In quite 
a similar spirit agrarian legislation has often restricted freedom 
of bargaining as between landlord and tenant. Yet the de- 
fenders of such legislation are by no means compelled to dis- 
parage freedom of contract. They may perfectly recognize that 
for individuals to have the power of entering into obligations 
without restraint arising from their birth or status is one of the 
leading differentie of the higher civilization. But they can 
point out that in this relation freedom has a somewhat ambiguous 


‘meaning. ‘The starving man may be free by the law of the land, 


but is not free by the law of the facts to reject the only bargain 
which enables him to obtain food. A contract is, in fact, never 
altogether free unless the parties to it are fairly on terms of 
equality, and they are not on terms of equality if the con- 
sequences of rejecting the bargain will be vastly more serious to 
the one than to the other. When economic conditions destroy 
this balance of equality it is held that the principle underlying 
free contract is rather maintained than disturbed by state 
regulations prohibiting contracts that are proved to be injurious 


336 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


to one of the parties. Thus, though—or let us rather say precisely 
because—“‘ contract ”’ is the basis of the modern social order, the 
character of contracts is a matter to which the state cannot and 
does not remain indifferent. If this analysis is correct, modern 
industrial legislation does not reject free contract as an exploded 
principle, but is rather seeking to get beneath the surface of the 
terms to the point where freedom is really to be found: and in 
this effort the conception of free contract, it would appear, must 
undergo a certain reconstruction. 

‘f Something similar seems to have occurred in the attitude of 
| legislation to the idea of private property. It is difficult to speak 
_ with certainty on a question where all the principles involved 
are matters of contention between rival parties, but, judging as 
far as possible from the trend of actual legislation alone, certain 
results emerge. In the_first-place, the modern state is committed 
to a wider conception of its-functions than that of Maintaining 
order or defending itself against aggression. In various direc- 
tions it takes active measures forthe promotion of common 
objects which experience has shown to be unattainable by 
individual effort. Of these objects some, like state education, 
touch the interests of the poor more directly than those of the 
rich, while others, like the provision for the maintenance of the 
indigent, avowedly benefit the poor alone. Yet it has to be 
recognized that if the cost of these objects were thrown by taxa- 
tion on the poorer classes they would largely defeat their own 
purpose, by intensifying the poverty which they are intended to 
relieve. Modern legislation, therefore, cannot wholly escape the 
criticism that it tends to throw upon the wealthy the cost of 
measures which primarily benefit the poor. Now, to the strict 
upholder of the absolute right of private property all such 
legislation must appear iniquitous. To him the right of the 
individual against the state stands on just the same footing as 
his right against any other individual. The right of the state 
to levy taxes for its own needs is, indeed, necessarily admitted, 
but this taxation is regarded as a kind of exaction imposed 
by the established authority and justified only by the needs 
of social order and national defence. Any tampering with 
the possessions of one class for the benefit principally of another 
is mere spoliation. The defenders of the present trend of 
economic legislation, if they take any higher ground than that 
of temporary expediency, are forced in effect to question this 
absoluteness of private rights. Without necessarily being com- 
mitted to any socialistic scheme of economic organization, they 
maintain that the rights of property rest upon the goodwill of 


PROPERTY AND POVERTY 337 


society, which provides and pays for the forces necessary to main- 
tain them and which may modify and at times has modified 
them in important particulars (e. g.in relation to inheritance and 
bequest). They urge, further, on economic grounds that there 
is a social element in value—the growth of society, its good 
order, the industries and exchanges which it facilitates, actually 
creating some kinds of wealth (e.g. much of the value of urban 
sites and of municipal monopolies), and entering as a factor into 
others. Even such a factor in production as good workmanship 
is in part attributable to the social order. The numerous 
‘intelligent, highly skilled and steady workmen whom a modern 
engineer can count upon finding ready to his hand put him into 
a very different position to that of Watt or even Stephenson. The 
existence of such a class is due to complex causes, but in large 
“measure it is attributable to the great social reforms of the inter- 
vening period, and the wealth that the class of skilled artisans 
create, whether it takes the form of profits to the employer or 
wages for themselves, has its root in social conditions which 
created them and were not created by them. To put it more 
| generally, the maintenance of good social order is the condition 
\of developed industry, and therefore of the wealth arising from it. 
Now those who emphasize these social factors in value are led 
to question the absoluteness of the rights of private property 
when urged against the state, and to contend that they should 
be viewed rather in relation to the social organization as a whole 
and defined in accordance with its needs. In this organization 
the individual has his place as a responsible agent, whose duty it 
is to do useful work and whose right it is to receive such reward 
as will call forth and serve to maintain his energies at their best. 
Society on its side has the duty of maintaining and improving 
the social order, and assuring to allits members the opportunity 
of finding their places within that order. That it may perform 
this duty, it has the corresponding right to a share in the wealth 
which it helps to create, and it does not go beyond its share as 
long as it leaves to energy, talent and initiative, devoted to useful 
ends, full scope for occupation and the stimulus of adequate 
reward. Such, in briefest outline, seems to be the principle 
underlying much of modern legislation—a principle which, it 
will be seen, implies a certain reconstruction of the conception of 
property, just as we saw above that other legislative tendencies 
compelled a reconstruction in the conception of contract. 


4, With the growth of property and the development of trade 
is closely bound up the question of the treatment of those who 
) Z 


338 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


{ are submerged in the process. But this opens the wider ethical 
|} question of the whole attitude of society to the helpless, the 
| suffering and the dependent. In this relation we shall have to 
| admit that the development of personal responsibility as shown 
in the growth of private property and of contract has its hardening 
side. The brightest aspect of primitive life is seen in its free- 
dom of giving, its expansive and often chivalrous hospitality, 
induced partly by the sense of a common necessity, but certainly 
facilitated by communal living. In the whole department of 
conduct which concerns the treatment of the helpless, whether 
it be the aged or the infirm, the child or the stranger, the diver- 
gence of the primitive from the civilized point of view both 
for good and for evil is strongly marked. We have the key 
to the difference if we keep always in mind, on the one hand, 
that primitive ethics knows nothing of those rights inherent in 
personality upon which the civilized order is founded, but that, 
on the other hand, through the very absence of individual re- 
sponsibility the movements of pity have free play, while, through 
the prevalence of family and village communism, they have a 
simple and natural means ready to hand for the relief of indigence. 

Both points appear in the treatment of the stranger. As 
such he is rightless. He belongs to no clan, and it is therefore 
nobody’s business to avenge him if robbed or slain. He must 
find a protector if he would be safe. Yet if he once enters 
into the bonds of hospitality he is sacred.1 Thus the stranger 
found outside a Red Indian camp might be treated as an enemy,? 
but once admitted as a guest he is sure of a hospitable recep- 
tion. The communal living in the joint household accustomed 
the Indian to the habit of readily sharing what he had with those 
who needed it. The Indian, says Morgan, “ would surrender his 
dinner to feed the hungry, vacate his bed to refresh the weary, and 


1 In a paper read before the Sociological Society, Dr. Westermarck has 
advanced strong reasons for the suggestion that magical conceptions have 
much to do with primitive hospitality. The guest is in a measure feared as 
a mysterious stranger. Outside the house he can do no harm, but once in 
contact with the property or the person of his host he may on magical prin- 
ciples be most dangerous. Hence at once a reason for the distinction made 
between his treatment inside and outside the dwelling-place, and for the 
importance of the ceremonial of contact whereby he acquires the right to 
hospitable entertainment. In the same way Dr. Westermarck refers the 
divine protection of the beggar to a humble origin in the fear of the beggar’s 
malediction. At the same time such explanations, however true in them- 
selves, do not settle the question how far such fears are the expression in & 
form congruous to primitive thought of an ethical feeling that something is — 
due to the suffering and the helpless. : 

2 See Waitz, iii. 166. 

° Morgan, Houselife, p. 61. 


PROPERTY AND POVERTY 339 


give up his apparel to clothe the naked.’ To such men the cold 
exclusiveness of the civilized man’s house is equally astonishing 
and repulsive. ‘‘ You know our practice,” said Canassatego, an 
eighteenth-century Ononadaga chief, to a white man, in a 
striking allocution which Morgan quotes. “‘Ifawhiteman. . 
enters one of our cabins we all treat him as Ido you. We dry him 
if he is wet, we warm him if he is cold, and give him meat and 
drink that he may allay his hunger and thirst; and we spread 
soft furs for him to rest and sleep on. We demand nothing in 
return. But if I go into a white man’s house at Albany and 
ask for victuals and drink, they say, ‘ Where is vour money ?’ 
And if I have none, they say, ‘Get out, you Indian dog!’’’? 
Every one knows of the hospitality of the primitive Arab, 
and how a sheikh would give away his last camel, or slay 
his favourite horse, for a guest’s benefit.2 Often the stranger 
has a mysterious sanctity. The hospitable host, like Abraham, 
may find himself entertaining angels unawares. The wanderer 
comes, as in early Greece, from Zeus. ‘‘ Do not treat strangers 
slightingly ’’ is an Ainu saying, “for you never know whom you 
are entertaining.’ A custom which alone makes possible any 
movement outside the boundaries of the tribe in the primitive 
world may well acquire a religious sanction.® 
/ Mother’s loye-is-the-foundation of human social life, and we 
re thérefore prepared to find that affection and care for chil- 
dren by one parent, if not by both, is traceable to the lowest 
levels of humanity. But the legal position of the child is not 
the same in primitive society as with us. The “right to live ”’ 
is a consequence of the ethics of personality and is not recog- 
nized by the savage, nor, if it were recognized, would infanticide, 
being an action committed within the family circle, necessarily 
attract the attention of any authority outside the family group. 
To primitive man having @ severe struggle for existence the 
advent of a new mouth to feed is often a serious matter. Hence 
infanticide is a not uncommon practice in the uncivilized world, 
and coincides with genuine and even devoted attachment to the 


1 Morgan, League of the Iroquois, p. 328. Similarly, Catlin (vol. i. p. 230) 
points out that the dog, though immensely valued, is sacrificed for a 
guest, if there is no other way of providing for him. Coldan (in School- 
craft-Drake, vol. i. p. 221) remarks that the Iroquois carried hospitality 
beyond the bounds of “‘ Christian civility ’’—a delicate way of referring 
to wife-lending. 

2 Morgan, The Iroquois, p. 329. 

3 See Palmer, Koran, Introduction, p. x. 

* Batchelor, p. 114. 

5 T have referred above (chap. vi. 236) to the extreme case of hospitality 
to enemies among the Bengalese hill men. 


—— 


age 


340 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


child if once allowed to live.1 If the father takes up the child,? 
if the clan decides that it is to be preserved, even,? it may be, 
if it has once taken food, its life is secure. It will be carefully 
tended, and often savage, like civilized, parents will go without 
food rather than let the child go hungry. Even orphans are 
among many people looked after.4. The restriction of infanticide 
to the weak and ill-formed marks the decay of the practice.® 


pad Lastly, in their treatment of the sick and aged, uncivilized 
/peoples differ greatly. Many are said to take great care of 


them. Others get a bad character from travellers. In many 
instances the helpless are abandoned, and in some they are, 
perhaps at their own request, put to a more merciful death.® 


1 A number of savage and barbarous peoples not practising infanticide— 
with special reference to female infanticide—are mentioned in Wester- 
marck’s Human Marriage, p. 311. 

There is no doubt that some earlier writers immensely exaggerated the 
practice. In the Simpler Peoples we did not seek to obtain negative 
instances, which are generally difficult to establish, but confined ourselves 
to enumerating the cases in which the practice is alleged, and reducing them 
to a proportion of the whole number for whose marriage and family life 
we had information. Except among the Hunters we found infanticide 
alleged, roughly speaking, in one case in eighteen only. Among thirty- 
nine Pastoral peoples there was only one case, a fact which should 
be compared with the similar record of these peoples for cannibalism and 
human sacrifice. Among the Lower Hunters the proportion rises nearly to 
one in four, chiefly owing to the prevalence of the custom in Australia. 
It is, however, quite intelligible that the practice should be commonest 
where the struggle for life is most severe (p. 242). 

2 Thus the Roman father was said tollere or suscipere liberos. So, too, the 
German father, but here the right of putting the new-born child to death 
belonged to other persons as well, especially the mother and grandmother. 
In the Frisian laws it is allowed to the mother only (Schréder, p. 67). 

3 Among the Creeks infanticide required the consent of both the clan 
and the parents (Schoolcraft, vol. v. p. 272). At Sparta it was a tribal 
matter. The elders of the phyle examined the child to decide if it were 
well formed, and if not it was exposed on Mount Taygetus (Busolt, 
p- 109). 

4 Among some South American Indians the chief is the guardian of 
bastards and orphans (Schmidt, Z. f. V. 1898, p. 289). Occasional 
notices of orphans suggest that the care which they receive is inadequate 
(cf. Schoolcraft, vol. ii. p. 194, The Dakotas; Waitz, vol. iii. p. 342, Indians 
of Oregon). 

5 The opposite sentiment is expressed in a remarkable manner by @ 
Toda woman. “‘ We never kill boys. As for girls, it is different; but 
still we only kill the sturdy and strong; it would be a sin to lay hands 
on the weakly and deformed ”’ (Reclus, p. 198). Female infanticide has 
greatly diminished among the Todas (Rivers, The Todas, p. 478, etc.). 

S$ The Andamanese are said to take the greatest care of the sick and help- 
less (Man, J. A. J., 12, 82), and so are the Central Australians. Among 
the North American Indians the aged are said to be generally respected 
yet are often left behind in necessity or put to death (Waitz, vol. iii. 
p- 115). That this is not quite so inhuman as appears to us is made 
clear by the narrative of Catlin in the text. The Oregon Indians are 
said to take good care of the aged, but the sick are often neglected (Waitz, 


PROPERTY AND POVERTY 341 


This is not altogether due to inhumanity. The savage, espe- 
cially the nomad, cannot with the best will in the world pro- 
' vide for the aged as we could if we desired to do so. Catlin 
saw an old man left behind with tent and fire, but no weapon, 
while the tribe marched off. The old man himself bade them 
leave him. “* You should all go, where you can get meat. My 
days are nearly all numbered, and I am a burden to my children. 
I cannot go, and I wish to die. Keep your heart stout and 
think not of me. Jam no longer good for anything.’ With 
_ these words the ceremony of abandonment was completed, and 
it was certainly not wanting in dignity or pathos.} 


5. In the earlier civilizations the solidarity of the family, 
cemented and extended as it often was by the development of 
ancestor worship, secured good treatment of the infirm and aged 
parent within the kindred. Towards the poor and helpless 
generally the Oriental civilizations teach the beauty and virtue 
of beneficence and consideration. This is strongly marked in 
ancient Egypt. The soul before the Judgment Seat winds up 
its repudiation of sins by claiming positive merit. ‘“‘I have 
given bread to the hungry man, and water to the thirsty man, 
- and apparel to the naked man, and a boat to the shipwrecked 
mariner.” 2 The inscriptions on the tombs of kings and nobles 


vol. ili. pp. 342-346, and Schoolcraft, vol. v. p. 654). Among the Winne- 
bagoes the aged and infirm sometimes suffered in seasons of scarcity, 
but they were helped by friends and relations, and the chief sometimes 
requested the U.S. Government to give such persons an extra share of 
the tribal annuity (Schoolcraft, vol. iv. p. 56). The Wintuns of Cali- 
fornia are said to be rather neglectful than otherwise of the sick and 
aged, and the mild statement is illustrated by the case of infirm people 
crawling to the river-side and being allowed to fallin and drown (Powers, 
p-. 231). Among the Iroquois a reform is recorded by Morgan. The aged 
were formerly exposed, but after the formation of the League and of 
permanent villages were well cared for (League of the Iroquois, p. 171). 
Among the Apaches and the Western Eskimo death is felt to be the 
best lot for the aged. The Eskimo believes he will be born again 
young and vigorous (Reclus, pp. 103 and 132). The practice of leaving 
the sick and aged to their fate or even putting them to death is widely 
diffused in Africa, but there are exceptions, e.g. the Mandingoes, and 
possibly the Kafirs (though this is denied by Waitz, vol. ii. p. 340). The 
custom is said to be recently extinct in Southern Nubia (Post, Afrik. 
Juris., vol. i. p. 298). 

1 Catlin, vol. i. p. 216. Whatever provision there may be for the 
aged and infirm it is, as we might suppose, mainly a matter of the goodwill 
of the family or clan. It is seldom in the savage world that we read of 
any regular public provision. The Creeks are an exception, who are 
described as having public ‘‘ hot houses ” provided in which poor old men 
and women suffering from want of clothes may sleep (Caleb Swan, in 
Schoolcraft, vol. v. p. 265). 

* Book of the Dead, chap. cxxv., Budge’s Tr., vol. ii. p. 372. 


342 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


lay stress on their goodness to the poor. They claim to be 
“the staff of support to the aged, the foster-father of the 
children, the counsellor of the unfortunate, the refuge in which 
those who suffer from the cold in Thebes may warm themselves, 
the bread of the afflicted which never failed in the city of the 
South.’ Ameny, a ruler of the nome of the Gazelle in the 
days of the 12th Dynasty, gives himself the best of characters 
as a good master and lord— 


‘“‘T have caused no child of tender age to mourn; I have 
despoiled no widow; I have driven away no tiller of the soil; I 
have taken no workmen away from their foreman for the public 
works; none have been unfortunate about me, nor starving in 
my time. When years of scarcity arose, as I had cultivated all 
the lands of the nome of the Gazelle to its northern and southern 
boundaries, causing its inhabitants to live, and creating pro- 
visions, none who were hungry were found there, for I gave to 
the widow as well as to the woman who had a husband, and 
I made no distinction between high and low in all that I gave. 
If, on the contrary, there were high Niles, the possessors of the 
land became rich in all things, for I did not raise the rate of 
the tax upon the fields.” } 


To our ears it may seem that the gentleman protests too 
much, and possibly he succeeds in giving us a more vivid 
picture of what the feudal lords of Egypt did than of what they 
refrained from doing, but at least he makes the ideal standard 
of conduct for the Egyptian ruler clear enough. 

Hospitality is still recognized as a virtue. Sinuhit, who fled 
to the Edomite desert, describes his life there— 


“When a traveller went and returned from the interior, he 
turned aside from his road to visit me, for I rendered services 
to all the world. I gave water to the thirsty, I set on his journey 
the traveller who had been hindered from passing by, I chastised 
the brigand.” 2 


On the other hand, in the Maxims of Ani of the New King- 
dom we see the civilized man’s fear of the beggar growing up. 
‘Let not your hand be despoiled for the man whom you 
do not know. He came to you for your ruin.” And again, 
‘“‘'Let your eye be open in fear lest you become a beggar.’ % 

1 Maspero, p. 338. Erman, pp. 93, 94. The translation varies slightly. 
For similar claims to have fed the hungry, ete., cf. Breasted, Records, i. 
126, 151, 162,171, ete. It was clearly the recognized duty of the nomarch 
(cf. p. 339, note 4). , 


2 Sayce, Records of the Past, vol. ii. p. 23. 
* Amélineau, trans. §§ xviii. and xxi. 


PROPERTY AND POVERTY 343 


Yet the Maxims preach hospitality with a touch of the later 
‘familiar gnomic sentiment—the suggestion that moderation in 
' prosperity is a kind of surety against the changes of fortune— 


“Eat not bread while another standeth by, and thou placest 
not thy hand on the bread for him. The one is rich, and the 
other is poor, and bread remaineth with him who is open-handed. 
ho was prosperous last year, even in this may be a vagrant.’”} 







We meet with fewer passages of this tendency in Babylonish 
iterature. But it appears from the Incantation Tables that 


ffailure in duty to the helpless, and especially the dependent, 
and churlishness in refusing a request, might bring a curse 


upon a man.” 

Respect for the aged is a part of the corner-stone of Chinese 
thics, the duty of filial obedience. But further, benevolence 
enerally, and the duty of the governor to the governed, are 

important parts of the ethical teaching. ‘‘ Benevolence,” says 
Mencius, “is the most honourable dignity conferred by Heaven,” 
and the classical writings are full of our duties to our neigh- 
bours, and of the rulers to the mass of the people. ‘‘ When 
sovereigns appointed inspectors,” says a passage in the Shoo- 
King, “they . . . said to them, ‘ Do not give way to violence 
or oppression; and go on to show reverence for the weak and 
find connections for destitute women.’’’? ‘Corn was left, as 
among the Hebrews, for the widows who came to glean. 
** There shall be young grain unreaped 
here some sheaves ungathered, 
There shall be handfuls left on the ground, 


And here ears: untouched 
For the benefit of the widow.”’ 4 


a 


Public assistance for the aged and infirm was organized by 
the Emperor Tai Tsung (4.p. 627-649). Foundling hospitals 
were also established, and under the Ming Dynasty, Hung Wu 
again took up the question of the aged and infirm. Almshouses 


and granaries for the relief of famine are also maintained.® The 


slow disintegration of the communal life has gradually forced 
the higher authorities to deal with the problem of the indigent. 


1 Griffith, World’s Literature, 5341. Tosomewhat similar effect, though 
in obscure language, Amélineau, § xxvi.: ‘“‘ It is God who is the giver— 
therefore have pity and feed the hungry.”’ 

2 For the text, see below, Part II. chap. ii. 

3 Shoo-King (Tr. Legge, Part V. xi. 3). 

4 She-King, vol. ii. part ii. book vi. ode 8. Legge’s Prolegomena, p. 


150. 
5 Laffitte, Chinese Civilization, pp. 53, 58. 


f 


4 
\ 


344 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


a 


4 


/ In India, almsgiving was recognized as an act of merit from — 
/ the Vedic period onwards. 


‘““The prosperity of the liberal man never decays; while the 
illiberal finds no comforter. He is the bountiful man who gives 
to the lean beggar who comes to him craving for food. Success 
attends that man in the sacrifice, and he secures for himself a 
friend in the future. He who keeps his food to himself has his 
sin to himself.”’ 1 


Similarly, the Upanishads teach that “there are three branches 
oflaw. Sacrifice, study and charity are the first.””* And again : 
“The divine voice of thunder repeats the same, Da, Da, Da, 
that is, Be subdued, Give, Be merciful. Therefore let that triad 
be taught, Subduing, Giving and Mercy.” ? 

In Manu the obligation of hospitality is peremptory. 


“‘ A guest who is sent by the (setting) sun in the evening, must 
not be driven away by a householder; whether he have come at 
(supper-time) or at an inopportune moment, he must not stay 
in the house without entertainment. 

“Let him not eat any (dainty) food which he does not offer 
to his guest.”’ 4 


But it is due in its fulness to caste-fellows alone. Towards 
members of a lower caste it is optional.? ‘To share one’s good 
things is a matter of positive duty. To eat first without feeding 
infants, the sick and others, will cause a man to be devoured by 
dogs and vultures after death.6 But no great self-sacrifice is 
expected. 


“A householder must give (as much food) as he is able (to 
spare) to those who do not cook for themselves, and to all beings 
one must distribute (food) without detriment (to one’s own 
interest).”’ 7 


The plucking of food by the wayside is allowed to the higher 
castes.2 Finally, in one passage we trace a higher social con- 
ception. The Sudra is naturally a slave, but even as a slave he 
ought to have his due maintenance.® 


1 Muir, Sanscrit Texts, vol. v. p. 431. 

2 The Upanishads, Tr. M. Miller, vol. i. p. 35. 

5 Miller, Upanishads, Part II. p. 190. * Manu, iii. 105, 106. 

5 Apastamba is more modern. “If a Sudra comes as a guest (to a 
Brahmana), he shall give him some work to do. He may feed him after ”’ 
(Sacred Books, vol. ii. p. 110). . 

° Cf. Baudh., ii. 3, 5, 17. “.He shall never eat without having given 
away (some small portion of the food).”’ 

* Manu, iv. 32. 8 7b., viii. 341, ® ib., x. 124, 125. 


PROPERTY AND POVERTY 345 


( Hebrew legislation dealt with the problem of poverty both 
with a view to prevention and to cure. We know with what 
wonderful power the prophets denounced the oppressors of 
the poor and declaimed woe upon those who joined house to 
house and field to field. The resistance to that tendency to 
the depression of the poorer citizens, which accompanies economic 
progress, was the main burden of social morality as preached 
by the prophets, and took practical shape in legislation in the 
form of the limitation of debt slavery; release of debts, accord- 
ing to Deuteronomy in the seventh year,! and according to the 
later code in the fiftieth; the prohibition of usury; and the 
insistence on equal justice between the stranger and the father- 
less. Deuteronomy adds that the debtor is to fetch his own 
pledge from his house, to have his pledged garment restored to 
him at nightfall, and that neither a millstone nor a widow’s 
raiment is to be taken. These were measures designed to 
prevent Israelites from falling out of the class of free men. 
There were, besides, the practical provisions for the relief of the 
poor. These were probably developed from common festivals 
of the clan, where every one had a right to claim a portion.’ 
For this purpose the Book of the Covenant makes use of the 
Sabbatical year, in which the land was to rest that the poor 
might eat. But they would not eat very much from the fruits 
of fallow land, and so Deuteronomy prescribes that a tithe of 
every third year’s produce shall be shared with the stranger, 
the fatherless and the widow. It also insists that the gleanings 
of the field and the vineyards be left to them.* The duty of 
almsgiving was rigidly enforced. ‘He who gave less than a 
tenth of his means was a man of evil eye.”’® There were collec- 
tions in the synagogues for the poor and the strangers, and there 
were elected almoners. Lastly, honour for the aged and regard 


1 Deuteronomy xv. 1. Verse 8 says in rather futile fashion that this is 
not to deter the Hebrew from lending to his brother, but it does not say 
what is to compel him. Note that by verse 3 the law does not apply to 
foreigners. 

2 This appears already in the Book of the Covenant, Exod. xxii. 25, 
and the next verse insists that the neighbour’s raiment when taken as a 
pledge is to be restored at sundown. Usury is uniformly allowed against 
the foreigner (Deut. xxiii. 20). 

3 Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, p. 250. 

4 Deuteronomy xiv. 28, and xxiv. 19-21. In the priestly code it would 
seem, however, that the tithe goes to the Levites, and it is re-enacted that 
the ‘‘ Sabbath of the land . . . shall befoodforthee ... thyservant... 
and thy stranger ”’ (Lev. xxv. 6). 

5 Maimonides, quoted by Loch, art. “ Charity and Charities,” Hncy. 
Brit., ed. x., p. 667. Loch adds that even the poor had to give alms, and 
a refusal was punished with stripes by the Sanhedrim. 


346 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


/for the afflicted are insisted upon as moral and religious 
' duties. 

In the law of Islam also almsgiving is insisted upon as one of 
the five practical duties of the creed. Usury is forbidden, and 
pronounced by the Prophet as being as accursed as almsgiving 
is blest. 


‘“‘ Those who devour usury shall not rise again, save as he riseth 
whom Satan hath paralyzed with a touch; and that is because 
they say ‘selling is only like usury,’ but God has made selling 
lawful and usury unlawful. God shall blot out usury, but 
shall make almsgiving profitable, for God loves not any sinful 
misbeliever.”’ 1 


The spoils of the enemy were to be for the poor. 


‘‘ What God gave as spoils to His Apostle of the people of the 
cities is God’s and the Apostle’s, and for kinsfolk, orphans, and 
the poor and the wayfarer, so that it should not be circulated 
among the rich men of you.” ? 


But after Mohammed’s time a rate on property of about 
one-fortieth of all that had been in the believer’s possession 
for a year, which had originally been a contribution to the 
expenses of war against infidels, became converted into a kind 
of poor rate.2 A plan of pensions for all Moslems was set on 
foot by Caliph Omar. 

/ 6. I have referred briefly to the position of the beggar and 
‘the suppliant in Homeric Greece. In Hesiod’s time we find the 
duty of liberality still insisted upon, but the attitude to the 
beggar is already changing. Hesiod reprehends begging as a. 
‘disgrace, and says that once beggars may be helped, or twice, 
‘and then they will be refused. He makes almsgiving a matter 
of reciprocity. ‘Love him who loves thee, and cleave to him 
who cleaveth to thee. To him who would have given give; 
to him who would not have given give not.’’* During the 
classical period some measure of the primitive communal 
system still lingered. In Crete and in Sparta there was direct 
maintenance for all citizens at the public tables. At Athens 
the phratry retained much of its old vitality. Down to Solon’s 
time the property of the childless reverted to the clan, and even 
vafter him the same thing happened to that of intestates. Out 
‘of this stock the clan provided for orphans, and the nearest 
jagnatic relation had either to marry or dower the orphan girl. 


1 Koran, i. (Sacred Books, vi.), p. 44. 2 Koran, chap. lix. 
3 Palmer, Introduction to the Koran, p. 73. * Loch, Ency. Brit., p. 660. 


PROPERTY AND POVERTY 347 


But the new state organization also assumed the duties of 
“maintaining needy citizens, in the first place, by public granaries 
‘and the frequent distribution of food to adult citizens on the 
Tegister; secondly, by public relief to the infirm with property 
of not more than three mine ; and lastly, by payment for public 
services, which became more and more important as the institu- 
_tions of the country passed into the hands of large popular 
_bodies.1 Moreover, an indirect method of maintaining the roll 
of citizens and preventing them from sinking into slavery 
and being lost to the state was found in colonization, bands of 
Athenian citizens being led out to a newly conquered territory 
and settled in lots on the land. Solon’s legislation against 
debt slavery had already effectually blocked that broad path 
of degradation in the ancient world. Apart from state aid 
there was much private charity, and mutual help societies were 
frequent. Hospitality still ranked as an important virtue. In 
some places there were brotherhoods of public charity with a 
common chest, and there were resting-places and probably 
hospital provision for travellers at the temples.2 The temples 
also were the centres of medical relief. The sons of Asklepios 
dwelt in their neighbourhood, and probably attended the poor 
gratuitously, at least at Athens. Hippocrates lays down that 
it should be a doctor’s first duty on entering a town to attend 
to the poor who are sick.® 
In Rome, the economic tendency to the centralization of 
capital and the consequent reduction of the poorer citizens to 
‘destitution and dependence took a very aggravated form, owing 
in part to the facilities offered by conquest and in part to the 
cheapness and the abject position of the slave. The legislation 
of the Gracchi, intended to counteract this evil, was probably 
valuable so far as the division of the public lands was concerned, 
but injurious in that it started the system of distributing corn 
a Roman citizens at about half the cost price, a system which 
had an immense and unhealthy development. The Lex Octavia 
restricted the right to citizens settled at Rome, and probably 
later legislation introduced a property test, but the Lex Clodia 
made the distribution gratuitous, and in the time of Aurelian 


1 Distribution of public money was opposed by Aristotle, who urged 
that the object of statesmen should be to make the mass of citizens in- 
dependent, and advised that public relief should take the form of starting 
them in farms or in business (Aristotle, Politics, 1320a). 

2 At Megara there were houses in the town for strangers, maintained at 
the public cost, and in Crete strangers had a place at the public meals 
(Loch, 662). 

* Loch, 662, 663. 


348 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


there were important additions, consisting probably of oil, and 
perhaps of wine and clothes. The system spread to Constanti 
nople, Alexandria and Antioch, and with the extending of civic 
rights to the whole of the Empire must have tended to foster 
a vast and idle city proletariat. 

In other directions Roman charity had a more beneficent 
turn. Hospitals with infirmaries for sick slaves attached are 
mentioned in the first century A.D., while there was a chief 
physician in each regio for the poor. Voluntary associations 
for common purposes had a vigorous vitality. There were 
trade guilds with a strongly-developed social life, with their 
special rites and their own god. They held holidays in common 
in which men and women both took part, and provided for the 
burial of their members. In fact, most of the poor belonged 
to funeral benefit societies. The care of destitute children 
was undertaken by the Emperors Nerva and Trajan,who lent 
money at low interest to municipalities for their upbringing. 
At Veleia three hundred children were thus assisted. But 
the system, though much extended by the Antonines, fell into 
disuse in the troubles of the third century. 


7. The problem of poor relief was now taken up by the Church. 
This was in its primitive form a congregation in which the 


1 Loch, 664, 665. 

2 During the first century after Christ there were charitable organiza- 
tions of many kinds in the Roman world. Money was given or bequeathed 
to buy oil and meal, which was either given away or sold at moderate prices. 

Poor parents received help in the bringing up of their children, until 
the latter could reasonably fend for themselves. There were foundations 
for the helpless aged, and the sick were cared for, not only by their own 
community, but through private agencies. Medicines were distributed 
free. Free burial places were provided by the community, or again from 
private sources. 

Rich burghers supported education, and in a.p. 100 the younger Pliny 
gave a library and means to support it to Como, and provided a teacher 
for the higher branches of education, so that would-be students there were 
no longer forced to go to Milan (Plin., Hpp. iv. 13). On great occasions 
it was customary to make some public gift—buildings, foundations, gladia- 
torial games, ete. (Friedlander, Darstellungen aus der Sittengeschichte Roms., 
iii. 151). 

3 Social intercourse appears the most prominent side of the life of the 
guilds. How far they were “ friendly societies ’’ in our sense is not quite 
so clear, but the provision for burial was usual, and at least in one case 
other benefits were assured. On these points, and on the immense develop- 
ment of the “colleges,” see Dill, Roman Society from Nero to Marcus 
Aurelius, Book II. chap. iii. 

4 Friedlander, i. 146-152. The collegia passed under state supervision 
and gradually developed into something of the nature of castes; members 
who fled were brought back and children were compelled to succeed their 
parents in their turn. 


PROPERTY AND POVERTY 349 


poorer members were relieved out of the offerings given at the 
altar. As the Church became divided into parishes, the parish 
‘became the area for relief, and in Rome, under Gregory, the 
deacons had the care of the poor, the widows and the orphans 
in their districts, in each of which there was a hospital. Besides 
this regular relief, on the first of every month Gregory made a 
istribution in kind to the poor. This was the model of medieval 
istribution, the parishes maintaining their poor, while the 
ishops and abbots set aside in addition a definite sum for their 
elief. Kndowed charities were, in fact, springing up rapidly in 
the fourth century, and the Theodosian code mentions institu- 
tions for the receipt of strangers, for the poor and sick, as well as 
orphanages and houses for children. The tithe became a legal 
obligation under Charlemagne, and out of it the priests had the 
definite duty of supporting the poor. Almsgiving was a work 
of merit from the first. “If there were no poor the greater 
part of your sins would not be removed; they are the healers 
of your wounds,” says St. Chrysostom. And not only was 
almsgiving virtuous, but voluntary poverty was an ideal. It 
did not escape the leaders of the Church that abuses were 
incidental to such a principle, and St. Ambrose recognizes the 
evils of pauperism and urges method in giving, though his rule 
is little more than a recommendation of impartiality. On the 
other hand, the dangers inherent in the conception were much 
aggravated by its being linked with the system of indulgences.t 
The whole conception, however, was swept away by Protestant- 
ism, which accordingly gave an impulse to the movement for 
substituting public for the ecclesiastical relief of the poor. 
Already from the growth of the towns new charitable agencies 
had arisen. The guilds undertook to collect for the support of 
their members, boroughs established hospitals and almshouses, 
gave out-relief to the registered poor and supported orphans.? 
England the disappearance of serfdom and the new indepen- 
dence of the working classes began to exercise the minds of the 
rulers of the country from the middle of the fourteenth century. 
The confusion between the vagrant and the independent work- 
1 According to Thomas Aquinas, he who does an act of charity merits 
spiritual good through being in a state of charity, and its effect in this 
respect is tested by the recipient being moved to pray for the benefactor. 
St. Thomas recognizes that the claims on our beneficence are relative, 
depending on such considerations as relationship, but alms should consist 
of all that is superfluous, the donor retaining what is necessary to him 
in view of his needs, his family and his dignitas ; but his gift should only 
meet the actual necessities of the recipient, and not be such as should lead 


to excess or apathy (Loch, 675). 
2 We find this system as early as the ninth century (Loch, p. 677). 


350 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


man seeking the best market for his labour dates back to that 
time, and inspires much of the severity with which the sturdy 
and valiant beggar is treated in the series of laws from the 
| Edwards to Elizabeth. For, blended with just indignation at 
the idler and impostor was the intelligible but sinister desire of 
the governing classes to keep the newly enfranchised labourer in 
a state of economic subjection. For this purpose it was not 
merely necessary to fix wages, but also, as far as possible, to 
prevent the workman from moving freely in search of a better 
market.1 Hence the repressive side of the later medizval 
legislation. On the other hand, as long as medizval charity 
lasted much relief was given, though with little system, by the 
monasteries, and from 1287 onwards the parish became the area 
for a more or less compulsory rate. The religious and economic 
changes of the sixteenth century produced a new situation. 
The suppression of the monasteries closed one source of poor 
relief, while the conversion of arable land to pasture restricted 
the labour market. Mendicants—sturdy and valiant beggars— 
were treated with a severity which culminated in the statute of 
Edward VI. offering them as temporary slaves to the first comer. 
But meanwhile a more humane conception was making way. 
Attempts were made to classify the poor and provide mainten- 
ance for the “‘impotent, feeble and lame who are poor in very 
deed,’’? while the able-bodied were to be sent to Bridewell for 
correction. The movement culminated in the Act of 1601, 
which definitely acknowledged the duty of society as an organ- 
ized body to save its poorer members from actual destitution, 
by appointing overseers in each parish with power to levy 
rates for the support of the indigent. But in the actual working 
of this just and beneficent principle great dangers were disclosed. 
The standing difficulty of discriminating between those who 
would and those who would not work, and the conflicts between 
humane sentiment and desire for economy, led by different 
roads to the degradation of large sections of the working class. 
The economical motive stimulated each locality to reduce the 
number of mouths that it might have to feed, and so led speedily 
to the Act of Settlement (1662), which enabled the overseers 
to compel any immigrant into their parish to return to his 
original abode, unless he could give security to the new parish 
that he would not become chargeable to it. Thus, on the 
one side,* the Poor Law threatened the working classes with a 
new serfdom. On the other, it tended when laxly administered 


' See Fowle, Poor Law, p. 55. 2 Loch, p. 676. 
* From the Statute of 1551 (Fowle, p. 57). * See chap. vii. p. 308. 


fio general pauperization, and issued towards the close of the 
‘eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century in a 


PROPERTY AND POVERTY 351 


oe whereby regularly insufficient wages were regularly made 


gone at the expense of the ratepayers.! 
©The worst features of the Act of Settlement were repealed in 


1795, and the whole system of the Poor Law revolutionized in 
1834. With the workings of the new system thus constituted 
and the problems to which it has given rise I must not here 
attempt to deal. But the broad principles underlying the atti- 
ude of the modern state towards the poor must be summarily 


‘indicated. The fundamental principle of 1601—that it is the 
duty of the public authority to see that no one actually perishes 


or want of necessaries—seems to be accepted—if sometimes in 
trudging terms—by modern civilized governments in general.? 

ut starting from this point a considerable onward movement 
can be traced. First, poverty and pauperism, though connected, 
are distinct, and this vital distinction is recognized in practice, » 
In very varying forms, much of modern legislation has been 
aimed at the alleviation of poverty and the raising of the mass 


_ of the industrial classes into an economic position in which they 
could fairly hope to provide the means of a civilized existence 


for themselves, their families, and even the helpless ones who 
belong to them. The methods used vary according to the spirit 
of the age or the economic circumstances of each people. In 
some countries great measures of agrarian reform accompanying 
the emancipation of serfs have established a free peasantry upon 
the soil. In our country, where the divorce of the labourer from 
the land remains, much has been done by reducing or abolishing 
the taxes on the necessaries of life, by sanitary legislation, by 
Factory Acts, and by the recognition of the right of combination. 
Such legislation as this belongs to the organic life of the modern 
state—it is among the processes of its healthy growth towards 
a fuller, completer existence. To such growth diseases are inci- 
dent, and among them pauperism is one of the chief. In dealing 
with this disease the effort of state-controlled and voluntary 
agencies alike is more and more directed to disentangling causes 
—to discovering what is due to lack of employment, what to 
physical incapacity, what to faults of character. It may frankly 
be admitted that we as yet have not much to boast of either in 

1 On the growth of the English Poor Law, see Loch, 676-680. 

2 See for France, Sweden, Denmark, Prussia, Holland, Austria, and the 
United States—Fowle, op. cit., pp. 6, 7. There is sometimes an attempt 
to distinguish between the duty of the state and the rights of the recipient, 


which ethically amounts to very little, though it might have legal 
importance. 


352 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


our diagnosis of causes or in our capacity to find remedies for 
each specific form of the disease. But it is something to have 
recognized that to have the poor always with us is not a blessing, 
and that the duty of the rich is not exhausted by the most 
liberal giving of alms. . Public and private charity have, in fact, 
undergone a transmutation which reflects the general change 
from the medizval to the modern order. Free bounty in alms 
is the virtue appropriate to the lord dealing with humble de- 
pendents, just as easy-going communism was natural to the 
primitive clan. A reciprocal obligation binding the individual 
to work for his living and the state to see that no one of its 
members fails to obtain the bare essentials of a civilized exist- 
ence is appropriate to a society resting on the recognition of 
personal rights. To develop these two principles in their full 
meaning, so to apply them in practice as to avoid any form of 
compulsion which would interfere with the equally stringent 
principle of personal freedom, to adapt them to varying circum- 
stances in such wise as best to help him who is impoverished 
through no fault of his own to regain his place in the ranks of 
independent labour, while yet taking suitable care of those who 
are mentally or morally incompetent to manage their own lives 
—these are problems which the future may solve. The most 
that we can claim for ourselves is that we are beginning to state 
them with precision. 


The poet tells us that with the advance of civilization the in- 
dividual withers, but the truer romance of historical prose tells 
a different story. In early society the individual is nothing 


/ apart from his community. The sphere of private property is 
very small and the power of the individual to enter into new 


relations by contract and so carve out a career is even less. 


_ Land, the principal source of wealth, is communally owned and 


there is little incentive to individual industry. On the other 


_ hand, if there is no wealth, there is also no pauperism. In- 
_ equality grows as society advances, and in this advance, on its 


economic side, private ownership and free contract play the 
principal part. Yet both these factors are still greatly hampered 
in the early and middle civilizations by feudal tenures and caste 
restrictions. So far as these remain the structure of society is 


_ still comparatively immobile. The position of the individual is 


still determined more by inherited status than by his own deserts. 

At a still higher stage these restrictions fall away. Men stand 
fully free to enter into occupations of all kinds, to acquire wealth 
in all forms, and to dispose of and (in many cases) bequeath it 


f 
{ 


PROPERTY AND POVERTY 353 


at their will. No divisions of class or even of nationality inter- 
-fere with their movements or prevent them from entering into 
Telations with other men in which they may find advantage. 
But these general statements have to be taken with one limiting 
condition. The liberties that men enjoy are secured only by the 
social order maintained by the state, and the state in its turn 
has to demand that every right must be defined in terms of the 
common good, and neither private property nor free contract can 
escape this general law. Thus the modern world rests in a fuller 
sense than previous civilizations on the free individual, but the 
‘individual owes his freedom to state law, and the obverse side 
of the rights which he enjoys is the social duty which he owes. 
Society has freed him from other ties, but not from the tie 
which binds him to the social life. If the individual is one pole, 
society as a whole is the opposite pole of the modern ethical 
system. 
Finally, customs admitting the acquisition and holding of 
property have as their reverse side the necessity for dealing with 
those who have and can acquire none. Here we have a quite 
parallel evolution. In primitive society there is an easy com- 
-munism among the kinsfolk, often—but by no means always— 
much consideration for children, the aged and the helpless,.and 
lavish hospitality for the stranger if the host chooses to receive 
him. In the more advanced societies the duties of the govern- 
ing classes are strongly insisted on by religion and social ethics. 
Those whom the decay of primitive communal institutions has 
left helpless and who have fallen outside the regular lines of 
the social structure are recommended to the charity of their 
superiors. The lords of the land must be merciful and forbearing 
to their dependants. The rich are taught to give freely out of 
their abundance to the poor. At a higher stage, again, the 
method of arbitrary doles to a dependent class gives way to 
_the conception of a reciprocal obligation between the state and 
its citizens, and contented acquiescence in perpetual poor relief 
to the systematic attempt to get at the roots at once of poverty 
and pauperism by organic reform in the economic structure of 
ociety. 


SUMMARY 


We have now considered in'outline, first, the main princi 
underlying different forms of social organization ; } aa ee iS chal 
manner in which the behaviour of individuals is regulated, 
‘their duties enforced and their rights maintained ; and thirdly, 
a number of the rules determining in the main ‘relations of life 
-\what those rights and duties are. We saw that primitive society’ 
rested on ties spontaneously formed by blood-kinship, by inter- 
' marriage and perhaps by mere neighbourhood; that the social 
structure is extended and in some respects also consolidated by 
the rise of military power and the separation of rulers and ruled ; 
we saw that the principle of force, underlying government at 
this stage, is transmuted. and partially moralized by ethical and 
religious influence into a principle of authority, exacting obedi- 
ence of its subjects as a right, but owing them consideration and 
paternal government as a duty. We saw, finally, that in the 
_ higher civilizations a new principle makes headway, whereby 
| the fabric of society comes to rest rather upon the goodwill of 
the citizens and the social nature of man, while the claims of 
_ government are based not on self-constituted authority backed 
ultimately by the sword, but on the necessity of an ordered rule 
‘in the interests not only of social co-operation, but of individual 
\freedom. 

In the maintenance of rights and redress of wrongs, the move- 
ment, broadly viewed, is parallel. In the beginning, self-redress 
by the individual, by his kindred, or some other small group 
is the predominating fact. Hence we ascend by many grada- 
tions to the impartial justice of a public tribunal, investigating 
each case by rational process, distinguishing crimes from civil 
wrongs and limiting the responsibility for a wrong to the indi- 
vidual perpetrator. Growing up, as a rule, under the shadow 
of the principle of authority and acting in the interests of external 
order rather than of personal rights, the law is administered 
often with insufficient safeguards for the innocent and with cruel 
severity to the criminal, and the next step is to remedy these de- 
fects by changes aimed at reforming the criminal and cutting off 
the sources of crime. At each step there is an advance in the 
maintenance of order, and on reflection we recognize that the 

354 


SUMMARY 355 


better maintenance of order means greater security for individuals 
in the enjoyment of their rights. Again, the elaboration of the 
legal view of responsibility isolates the individual from the 

roups which in primitive society stand and fall together. But 
it isolates from these only to bring him into close dependence 
on a wider society—the state as a whole, to which he finds himself 
‘bound by mutual obligations of duties and rights. 

In the position of women and the structure of the family we 
find a development which, if not parallel, is yet analogous. We 
have seen the natural family beginning with a relatively loose 
organization, and passing into a state in which close-knit rela- 
tions were obtained at the expense of the wife, while the aim 
of the higher civilizations appears to be to reconcile the intimacy 
of the union with equal freedom for both parties. The move- 
ment is, on the one hand, towards closer structure, on the other 
to personal freedom, and the problem is, again, to reconcile the 
claims of personality and the duties of a common life, though 
this common life is here that of two individuals rather than that 
of all society. On the other hand, in the position of women, 
economically and socially, apart from the question of marriage, 
it is the idea of personality that is mainly prominent. For in 
the early stages there is little respect for women, and, so far as 
labour is divided, it is more often than not to their disadvantage. 
Then in spite of the dependence of the wife there arises as a partial 
compensation the view that woman has a sphere of her own, 
in some ways higher than that of her lord. But when this view, 
which carries in it the seeds of a deeper respect for women than ° 
the older world conceived, is pushed to its conclusion, it is seen 
that, to realize what is in them, women, too, must have the open 
field which men demand, and be free, if it be only to work out 
and establish their diversity. 

_ From sex we passed to other divisions of human beings which 
jaffect the conception of moral obligation. In the primitive 
world every man is a member of a group to which his obligations 
trictly so-called are limited, members of other groups being 
‘Indifferent or hostile. From this “group-morality ”’ arises, first, 
the problem of intertribal, or, as they afterwards become, inter- 
ational relations. In the early stages these relations are fre- 
uently hostile, and hostility is directed towards the individuals 
f the opposing community, and not merely against the com- 
nunity as a corporate whole. A step onward is taken when the 
‘personal character disappears from warfare and the result of 
‘yictory, even if pushed to the point of annexation, is not to 
ancel the rights of the conquered or to punish them for attach- 









356 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


ment to their own side. Lastly, in this fuller recognition of a 
/common humanity—for that is what it amounts to—we find the 
| beginning of a more far-reaching conception of a law, and there- 
pow ultimate of a society of nations to which each independent 
state owes allegiance. 
i Considered internally, the small primitive group was found 
‘to be—apart from the distinction of sex—generally speaking, a 
/society of equals. Differences of class or caste, and the distinc- 
‘tion of free man and serf or slave, arose in the earlier phases 
| of social growth. On this side personal rights are apt to suffer 
} 


—— 


| 


| deterioration in the earlier phases of social advance. The 
| growth of a large order and a firm authority is hostile at the 
/ outset to the maintenance of individual freedom and social 
equality. Ethical and religious progress tends to redress the 
balance, and the claims of personality reassert themselves 
piecemeal in the higher civilizations. But this wider recogni- 
tion of personal rights implies that the barriers which divide 
classes and sections of the community are overcome, and a true 
social unity achieved. 
{ Turning from the rights of person to those of property and 
contract, we have seen the simple quasi-communism of primitive 
‘peoples give way to a system of free contract and individual 
‘ownership, from which the hampering restrictions of caste and 
apart status gradually fall away. Once again individual energy 
and initiative are set free from all restrictions, but once again 
\individual freedom was seen to raise questions of social control. 
| Finally, in the treatment of the poor we have traced an analogous 
movement from the customs of hospitality and free sharing 
between neighbours through the paternal benevolence of a 
‘superior caste to the recognition of a mutual obligation as 
/ between the individual and the state. 
_ Thus, amid all the variety of social institutions and the ebb 
and flow of historical change, it is possible in the end to detect 
a double movement marking the transition from the lower to 
i. the higher levéls-of-civilized law and custom. On the one e hand, 
| the-social-order-is strengthened and extended. The blood feud — 
yields to the reign of law, personal chiéftainship to a regular 
, government and an organized police. At the same time the 
' social organization grows in extent. Instead of small primitive 
groups we have nation-states or continental empires, great areas” 
enjoying internal peace and owning a common law. On this 
side the individual human being becomes more and more subject. 
' to social constraint, and, a8 we have frequently seen, the changes 
| making for the tightening of the social fabric may diminish the 


SUMMARY 357 


' rights which the individual or large classes of individuals can 
claim, so that fewer rights may be enjoyed, though, with the 
-improvement of public order, those which remain are more 
_ secure. In this relation liberty and order become opposed. 
_ But the opposition is not essential. From the first the indi- 

vidual relies on social forces to maintain him in his rights, and 
in the higher form of social organization we have seen order 
and liberty drawing together again, the underlying truth that 
unites them being simply that the best ordered community 
jis that which gives most scope to its component members to 
|)make the best of themselves, while the “ best ’’ in human nature 
jis that which contributes to the harmony and onward movement 
of society. Thus the modern state comes to rest more and 
more on the rights and duties, the obligations and responsi- 
' bilities that we include under the ethical and legal conception 
| of personality. THe responsible human being, man or woman, 
_is the centre of modern ethics as of modern law, free so far as 

law and custom are concerned to make his own life, bound 
by no restrictions of status nor even of nationality or race, 

answerable for his acts and for those of no other, at liberty 
_to make the best or the worst of himself, to accept or decline 
_Telations with others. On the other hand, as this free individual 
| breaks the shell of the older groupings, he comes into direct 
relations with the state as a whole which succeeds to many of 
the rights and duties of the older groups. The social nature of 
man is not diminished either on the side of its needs or its duties 
by the fuller recognition of personal rights. The difference is 
that, so far as rights and duties are conceived as attaching to 
human beings as such, they become universalized, and are there- 
fore the care of society as a whole rather of any partial group 
organization. ‘The typical instance of this change is the rise of 
public courts enforcing a law which is equally binding on all 
members of society. But, lastly, the universalism which the 
idea of personality holds within it cannot be satisfied with the 
limits of the nation-state. In proportion as obligations are 
determined by human nature as such they overstep national 
and racial as well as family and class limitations, and apply to 
humanity as a whole. Hence, as bas been seen in analyzing 
the idea of internationalism, the double meaning of “‘ humanity ”’ 
as an expression for a certain quality that is in each man, and 
8 an expression for the whole race of men, is not a mere 
mbiguity. The two meanings are intimately related, for 
“humanity ” as a whole is the society to which, by virtue of 
the “humanity” within each of us, we really belong, and 


—s 


‘ 



















358 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


these two meanings are the poles between which modern ethical 
conceptions move. ‘Thus, if we are to sum up the whole process 
sketched in this Part in a phrase, we may say that it is in 
this double sense to realize-humanity. 

The controversies which have filled modern history attach 
themselves in their ethical aspect sometimes to one side, some- 
_times to the other of this principle. Of many of these little 
' has been said in this Part, because in outline the facts are 
| well known and a detailed discussion would be impossible within 
| the limits of a general sketch. It may, however, be pointed out 
that the ethical questions which have agitated the modern world 
from, say, the period of the Reformation to our own day have 
turned either on the vindication of personal right or on the 
extended conception of human brotherhood. On the one hand, 
ethical progress has taken the form of a protest against the 
principle_of authority which at the outset of the period every- 
where dominated the world, and, so far, has tended to curtail 
the sphere of government in favour of individual liberty. This 
is the history, for example; of the very gradual process whereby 
first liberty of conscience and finally religious equality has been 
established as a corner-stone of the modermstate. This change 
is sometimes represented as merely a consequence of religious 
| scepticism, the implication being that if the world held itself as 
certain of fundamental truths as it did in the twelfth century it 
would not hesitate to impose them on all its members by force 
as it did then on the rare occasions which arose. But there is 
a deeper principle involved, illustrating the many-sided meaning 
of the idea of Personality. Far from implying an indifference 
to religion, the principle of religious equality is a recognition of 
' the profound importance of intellectual sincerity, particularly in 
relation to the deepest problems of life. From the moment that 
honesty is recognized as a duty it becomes increasingly repugnant 
to penalize the beliefs to which it may lead. The heavier the 
penalties the more exclusively they fall on the stoutest and best 
natures—that is, precisely on those best qualified under happier 
circumstances to serve society; and the only logical alternative 
is to admit the necessity for divergencies in an imperfect world. 

It is not to be supposed that this principle is free from logical 
defects or practical difficulties. It is easy to show that there are 
or may be opinions which in some relations must disqualify the 
holder. For example, a sincere conviction which would prevent 
a man from conscientiously discharging the duties of a particular 
office must disqualify him from holding the office. But the 
principle of freedom in opinion would merely require that his 


SUMMARY 359 


unorthodox or unpopular views should not disqualify him for 
other offices with which they are not concerned. In other words, 
freedom is limited by responsibility. A man undertakes to fulfil 
a certain social function, to-administer, to teach, or to preach, 
‘and it is expected that he will fulfil and not exceed that function, 
‘and as long as he does so his thoughts are his own. There is 
thus a certain logic below the apparent compromises of public 
life which, by enabling men of most diverse views to co-operate 
without injury to their own self-respect, secures the best brains 
and the highest characters for the public service. 

_ The modern state undoubtedly uses constraint, as every 
organized society must do, but the grounds on which constraint 
is justified in the modern world are distinctive and significant. 
For constraint may be justified, and in the older conception was 
justified, on the ground that if a man will not do what he ought 
he must be made to do it, and it may be applied to speech and 
writing on the ground that if it is wrong to do a thing it is equally 
wrong “to recommend it. But it is precisely in these two rela- 
tions that compulsion most offends the modern idea of liberty. 
To forge a person to act rightly _ for his own sake implies an 
ethical confusion, for it is only in so far as_he acts freely that 


a ELLIE II ALLE 


his actions. have. ethical_v: 1 value. Conversely, to suppress free 
speech is to bring force into the true spiritual world—the world 
of ideas, where it is most urgent both from the personal and 
ultimately from the public point of view that there should be 
freedom. On the other hand, when the freedom of one man ii 
used to molestation of another or the hindrance of what =) 
deemed his legitimate activities, constraint is required. And i 
individual freedom may not be used to the prejudice of another 
individual, neither can it claim the right to thwart the will of 
society as a whole. Hence an important distinction which will 
be found to underlie much of modern legislation. As long as 
the general will can be carried out effectively without com- 
pelling the reluctant minority to follow suit, the tendency is 
to avoid compulsion. On the other hand, where certain con- 
ditions are believed to be essential to the common good, and 
the recusance of a minority, perhaps of a few individuals, would 
render them unattainable, compulsion is deemed legitimate. 
In such cases it is felt that the general will, dealing with general 
interests, has rights quite comparable in kind to those of the 
individual will in relation to its individual interests, while to 
enforce compulsion is, after all, only in accord with the universally 
admitted limit to liberty that it does not convey the right to 
injure others. Further, compulsion is limited to actions, since 


360 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


words alone cannot impede a resolute majority from doing what 
they wish to do, unless, indeed, their convictions are a little 
shaky, and in that case it may, perhaps, be all the better for 
them to hear the other side. Again, in leaving expression free, 
the law leaves to each man what is peculiarly his, the right 
to think for himself and honestly express his convictions whether 
he is allowed to act by them or not. In all these ways the idea 
of personality seems to have profoundly influenced the theory 
and practice of legislation, tending not always to the curtail- 
ment of social activity—for, as we shall see later, it has a counter 
tendency in the enlargement which it gives to the conception 
of the common good—but certainly to the material modification 
of the character and aims of law. 

Freedom of discussion practically implies the influence of 
discussion upon govérnment, and the doctrine of popular sove- 
reignty with universal suffrage drew its strength first in the 
modern world from the conception of the right of each individual 
to have a voice in determining the laws under which he has to 
live. The democratic movement was directed at the outset 
against arbitrary power. Its first demand was for personal free- 
dom, 7.e. immunity from arbitrary treatment and security in 
the possession of legal rights. The political rights which came 
next appeared naturally as an extension of this freedom and as 
another check of governmental authority. But as soon as they 
were adequately secured and the ultimate sovereignty of the 
people was realized, the notion of a check on government became 
inadequate. The people as a whole could not be engaged merely 
_ in checking itself. In point of fact, whenever it was a question 
of extending the franchise it was another side of the principle of 
personality, the idea of equal rights, that came forward. But 
this idea, while founded on personality, is meaningless apart 
from the conception of something which all share alike, and 
equality in political rights, therefore, implies a community in 
which members have an equal right to take part in the functions 
of government—that is to say, merely a more perfect or more 
complete community than one in which certain members are 
wholly or in part excluded from the common life. Political 
democracy, therefore, seems to range the whole distance be- 
tween the two poles of the humanitarian idea, resting on the 
pinciple of personality on the one hand and of the all-embracing 
community on the other. 
| The family and the state are not the only communities which 
men form. On the contrary, a leading characteristic of the 
modern world is the ease with which people combine for pur- 


SUMMARY 361 


poses of all kinds, from that of hearing each other’s views on 
Browning to that of regulating wages or promoting the passage 
of a Bill in Parliament. The right of association is one which 
often raises grave political and social problems, and, strangely 
enough, it can be brought into contact with both poles of our 
“underlying principle,” and in either case it may receive sup- 
port or opposition according to the reading of the facts. Take 
the case of trade unions. These were, as a matter of history, 
legalized in England under the influence of individualistic ideas, 
the ground taken being the right inherent in individuals to 
associate together freely for the promoting of their several 
interests. Yet- the strength of a trade union lies entirely in 
the Collective Bargain, and its moral force is derived wholly 
rom the conception of the workers in a given trade—ultimately, 

erhaps, all the manual workers of the country—as forming a 
community with certain objects in common. So far the trade 
union finds support_both in individualism and collectivism. Yet 
from both ideas it is possible to derive arguments against the 
right of combination. On individualist grounds it may be con- 
demned as impairing the rights of the non-unionist, on collec- 
tivist grounds as forming a state within a state, and assuming 
functions which only the government, representing employers as 
well as employed, brain workers as well as manual workers, can 
fairly carry out. Hence, in point of fact, trade unionism has 
always been opposed by the more extreme among Individualists 
and Socialists, and has found support among the more moderate 
of each party. The movements of opinion and of English legis- 
lation on the subject from 1800 to the present day reflect with 
tolerable accuracy the fluctuation of thought between these 
poles, according as now one, now another, aspect of the problem 
took the leading place in the public mind, the tendency being, 
upon the whole, to recognize the necessity of voluntary com- 
bination as a remedy for the economic weakness of the mass of © 
manual workers and to bring it by the definition of its rights 
and responsibilities more closely into connection with the state 
system. 

What has been said of trade unions applies mutaits mutandis 
to voluntary association in general. The state organization is 
far from exhausting the necessities of common action. It can 
use its power of compulsory taxation to carry out certain objects 
of common interest. But precisely because it uses compulsion, 
it has to give fair consideration to all classes and all sections and 
cannot wisely proceed further than the general opinion of the 
community warrants. Voluntary associations, on the other hand, 


362 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


which exercise no compulsion on any one except on their own 
members, who freely join and are free to leave them, may rightly 
pursue a thousand and one laudable objects for which a com- 
bined effort is necessary, but which, perhaps, appeal only to 
afew. Thus the fuller development of the principle of com- 
munity or association does not necessarily imply a continual 
expansion in the sphere of state activity. On the contrary, the 
activity of voluntary combination has developed and is developing 
with at least equal rapidity. 

Under the name of voluntary association we think naturally 
of combinations deliberately formed for some definite purpose. 


. But there is also a form of common life into which men fall, 


if not hindered, by a kind of instinct, a life based on old tradi- 
tions, and a certain community of character, language, custom, 
and generally religion, all that goes to make up the impalpable 
but very real bonds of nationality. Struggles for national free- 
dom have made a large part of the modern movement, and 
have generally been associated with ideas of personal liberty 
and of popular sovereignty. Yet the connection of thought is 
not always easy to make out. Where a race is definitely held in 
subjection by an autocratic government which concedes to it 
neither political nor equal civil rights, the case is indeed clear 
enough. So far it does not differ from that of any disfran- 
chised class. But further, though fully enfranchised, a nation- 
ality may be incorporated against its will with a larger nation 
in one political community, and its separatist aspirations may 
then be regarded as having no special sanction in the principle 
of Liberty and as being opposed to the widening of human 
brotherhood in that they tend to split up society and perpetuate 
divisions. As to the first point, the proof of the argument is 
in practical experience. If it turns out possible to maintain the 
undesired union without special restrictions on the political and 
personal rights of the recalcitrant people, well and good. But 
the stronger the national feeling, the less likely is this to be the 
case and the further are governments driven along the road of 
coercion and into the forbidden ground of the modern spirit, 
where men are made to suffer most in proportion to their nobility 
and steadfastness of character. The heroes of nationalism have, 
wherever their cause has flourished, connected it with that of 
personal right, and put their opponents into the odious position 
of punishing men for qualities which in a cool hour they must 
themselves admire. From the social point of view, again, if 
fewer differences existed"the problems of social organization 
_ would be much simpler, but the social life would also be poorer. 


SUMMARY 363 


At this point divergences in the conception of a community 
some to a head. If the best community is that in which the 
order deemed most suitable by the wisest heads is imposed on 
all members without regard to their wishes, then differences 
. f nationality can expect little consideration. But if the best- 
| eae society is that which makes most room for the self- 

evelopment of many different types, the case is altered, and 
just as there is free play for the individual so also is there room— 
though to make it may involve great changes in the govern- 
mental machinery—for those groupings of individuals which 
spontaneously form and stubbornly maintain themselves against 
legal pressure. Thus, from several points of view the re-grouping 
of peoples according to national divisions, which has made up 

o much of modern history, falls into its place as part of the 
wider movement which has replaced the arbitrary government 
of authority by the political state resting on the common good 
-and general assent of the great bulk of its citizens. 

Probably in all the movements here mentioned the side which 
has been most prominent in history has been the vindication of 
individual or group rights as against governmental authority. 
But it would be a mistake on that account to identify them with 
any general tendency towards individualism as against the claim 
of the common life. On the contrary, at every step the fuller 
recognition of rights implies a deepening sense of commo 
responsibility, since, as has been repeatedly asserted, the recog- 
nition of a right implies its maintenance by society. From the 
assumption of the duty of protecting life and limb onwards the 
development of the modern state has witnessed an extension of 
the sense of collective responsibility—a responsibility which may 
almost indifferently be stated in terms of the rights of individuals 
or the duties of society. On whichever of the two principles, 
in practice the modern state guarantees the bare necessaries of 
life to all its members, and adds thereto in varying degree the 
conditions of something more than a bare life. In a long series 
of industrial statutes it has sought to ensure the safety and 
health of the working class, and to protect its members from 
fraud and oppression. It maintains a certain standard of sani- 
tation in buildings, provides or encourages facilities for trans- 
port, and gives the rudiments of education without charge. 
How much further the state machinery can be profitably used 
in this connection is matter of controversy into which I do not 
inquire here. But whether trust be put in the machinery of law 
or the efforts of voluntary agency, the sphere of combined action 
grows in proportion as the respect for human personality deepens. 


364 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


The obligation to do what is in them to make life more human 
will be felt by some as a debt which they owe to suffering human 
beings, by others as something due to society. But in this 
relation at least it is easy to recognize that it is the same principle 
which is seen from two different sides, and that the conscious 
efforts to better the life of humanity in which the whole tend- 
-ency of modern thought is summed up can work through no other 
-channel than the humanity which is alive in every man and 
/ woman. 





cw ALA 


PART II 
THE BASIS 


CHAPTER I 
THE EARLY PHASES OF THOUGHT 


fa. THE history of law and custom gives us oné aspect of 
ethical evolution. It sets forth the standard of conduct, or 
rather the standards recognized by different societies at different 
times. But behind the question of the moral standard is that of 
the moral basis, the grounds on which morality rests, the spirit 
i which it is conceived. For, besides the question what kind of 
faction is expected from us by our neighbours, our rulers, our 
iritual pastors and masters, moral philosophy has to recognize 
e further question how it.is that these expectations arise. On 
hat grounds do rules of action rest, what authority promulgates 
hem and by what sanction are they enforced? If it happens to 
e the interest of any individual to disobey them, what reason, 
other than physical compulsion, can be assigned for adhering to 
them? What is the penalty of disobedience? What, if wrong 
is done, are the means of reconciliation? In other words, 
behind the question of the moral standard there is the philo- 
sophical question of the nature of moral obligation, of moral 
authority, of the moral sanction, or, to use one expression for 
them all, there is the question of the basis of the moral order. 
To understand how men have conceived this question, and 
what sort of answers they attempted to propound for it, is the 
task that remains for us. But to understand ethical evolution 
on this side we have first to turn to departments of thought that 
are not in their origin ethical. For men’s views of what is 
right are necessarily steeped in influences derived from their 
whole outlook upon the world, the range of their mental capacity, 
their conception of the creating, sustaining, and governing 
causes of things, their theories of human life and society. We 
cannot, therefore, thoroughly understand the history of ethics 
Without knowing something of the general development of 
thought. At the same time we cannot here deal with this. 
365 


366 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


development in all its fulness. We must refer to it only so far 
as it throws light upon our special question. We shall have, 
that is, to take account of what men think and of how they 
think upon certain fundamental questions that affect practice. 

It follows that we shall have to examine, however concisely, 
some leading features of religious development. Indeed, accord- 
ing to one usage of terms we should have to concern ourselves 
with nothing else. For a man’s religion is sometimes held to 
include the sum and substance of his vital thought, the final 
meaning for him of his total outlook upon the world, and if so it 
clearly includes ethics as a part. In a historical study, however, 
it is more convenient to consider religion as the body of belief 
and practice relative to a spiritual order on which human beings 
are dependent. The pivot of this order may be a personal being 
or beings, or it may be some conception of the conditions govern- 
ing the life and destiny of man. It may be the life beyond the 
grave and the means of securing happiness in that state which 
inspires the religious interest, or it may be the spiritual influences 
which shape the life of the individual and the race for good or ill. 
The conception of the spiritual is of infinite variety, and religions 
differ in accordance with the purity of its development, but in 
one sense or other there is religion when man’s life is held to be 
subject to spiritual beings or spiritual principles, to which he 
owes service, by which he is governed, with which he has in any 
way to make his account. In this sense religion and ethics, 
though intimately related, are not identical, nor is the religious 
view of the governance of the world, though vastly important, 
the only view with which we shall have to deal. We shall dis- 
tinguish, though we shall not therefore separate, the religious, 
the ethical, the scientific and other lines of development, and 
follow each in turn so far as is necessary for our purpose. 


“2. The religious interpretation of life and the world must at 
every stage use the materials of thought and experience that 
it finds to hand. Itself an effort to get on terms with the world 
surrounding human life, its tenets and practices are not directly 
suggested by experience, but it necessarily makes use of experi- 
ence and of such interpretations of experience, or such fancies 
and transformations of experience as the thought of its adherents 
are capable of forming. The religious interpretation of life, then, 
is relative to the general level of thought, and to understand the 
earlier phases of religion we can best begin by describing certain 
modes of conception conimon to early thought which are not 
themselves necessarily or invariably religious, but which supply 


THE EARLY PHASES OF THOUGHT 367 


‘material and even formative conditions of early religion. We 
may take, first,the theory of Spirits, to which the name Animism 
has—been-given_by anthropologists. The name and the defini- 
tion are so far open to criticism that the theory of a single 
‘Creator might be said to be covered by the general term. But 
when we look a little further into the matter we find that the 
kind of spirits intended where the term Animism is used have 
certain distinguishing characteristics. These characteristics are 
not invariable. Sometimes one is absent, sometimes another. 
Often our information is not sufficiently definite or complete to 
show us precisely how the spirit is conceived, but the features 
which we shall describe have a certain affinity to one another, 
and wherever the presence of any one of them is clearly marked, 
we may describe the belief as animistic. 
(a) The quasi-material soul—Whether the human soul was 
_or was not the original model on which the primitive conception 
of the spirit was formed, it serves for us as the type to which 
Spirits of all kinds can be compared, and is the natural starting- 
point, if not of history, at least of exposition. Now the belief 
in the human soul is not, as such, animistic. In one sense 
or another it may be called universal, for even an advanced 
“materialist must admit a difference between the living and 
the dead body, and if soul is a mere expression for the fact of 
vital function or, perhaps, of conscious life, can have no objec- 
tion to admitting its existence and extinction. He might rank 
himself, if he wished to use anthropological categories, with 
the animatists, for he regards the body as animated. What 
distinguishes the animistic view of the human-soul- is.that-itis 
an entity, separable from the body in which it dwells, but itself 
“possessing many bodily characteristics, as.of some.subtle material 
_essence. ~ Thus the spirit of man goes out in dreams, and appears 
to other people. Sometimes it leaves him temporarily when he 
sneezes, and hence it is well to pray for a blessing on him in such 
a@ moment, as we do unto this day. It quits him in trances; it 
leaves him finally at death. Since the spirit is a mere attenuated 
double of the man himself, it appears also in his shadow,! and 
can be seen mocking him when he stands by the side of a pool. 


~ 


1 For instances of the shadow or reflection as the soul, see Tylor, i. 430; 
Golden Bough, 3rd ed. Part Il. p.77. With this idea we may connect the use 
of a picture as a supplementary home or body for the soul of the deceased, 
which so often plays a prominent part in the cult of the dead, e.g. in ancient 
Egypt and in China (De Groot,i.113). The distinction between regarding 
the picture (1) as a receptacle for the dead man’s soul, and (2) as the dead 
man himself in a new form, is one which on animistic principles cannot be 
drawn with any clearness or consistency. 


368 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


These different appearances of the double, or spirit, have 
not escaped savage man, and have led him in many cases to 
an almost bewildering multiplication of souls.1 With that 
multiplication we need not now concern ourselves, we attend 
only to the fact of the soul’s transmigrations. This impalpable 
entity is itself, it may be, transferred from one dwelling-place 
to another, leaving the outer seeming unaltered. The souls of 
the dead may pass into tigers, as among the Malays, and often 
also in India, and in that form they may take vengeance on 
those who harm them in this life. And sometimes, if possible, 
the tiger is not killed for fear of injuring a dead relative,” but is 
greatly feared for his supernatural even more than his physical 
prowess. The soul may wander away voluntarily in a dream, 
and then sometimes may lose its way, or be prevented from 
returning. It may be extracted by sorcery or carried off by 
ghosts, whence come illnesses, madness, and death. It may be 
trapped while on its journeys, but it may also be recovered for 
a consideration by one who knows the proper charms to catch 
a soul. It may even be swallowed inadvertently by a doctor. 
If irretrievably lost it may be replaced—so loosely is it con- 
nected with the real personality of the man—by another soul 
purchasable at a price.? Finally, at death it still hovers in the 
neighbourhood, and may perchance be recalled if the mourners 
raise their voices and entice it with good things. 

The spirit being thus separable from the body and yet so 
intimately related, we have to inquire into the nature of the con- 
nection. Is the spirit dependent on the body, or does the body 
rather belong to the spirit, which enters it from without and 
merely uses it for a convenient dwelling? It would be hopeless 
to expect a consistent answer to these questions from animism. 
. Its conceptions fluctuate between the two ideas.> But this very 
elasticity helps animism to deal with many of the facts. Disease, 
for example, may be possession by a temporary demon.® The 

1 For illustrations, see Tylor, Primitive Culture, i. 434. 

2 Waitz, v. i. 166. 

3 For a summary of the evidence, see Golden Bough, 3rd ed. 1. 30-77. 

4 That this is the meaning of ceremonial wailing for the dead in China 
is shown by De Groot (vol. i. pp. 244, etc.). De Groot compares the Roman 
conclamatio, and corresponding customs in Picardy, California, the 
Caribbean Islands, ete. Religion has here, as so often, merely stereotyped 
and given inner meaning to a natural impulse. 

5 See Tylor, loc. cit. 

® With equal facility, in connection with the opposite pole of animism, 
disease becomes a quasi-material object, magic stones or pointing sticks, 
driven into a man by spirits, which can be extracted by a doctor, and 


perhaps transferred to another person, or walled up in a tree (Golden 
Bough, 2nd ed. iii. 29, ete.; Tylor, ii. 148). 


THE EARLY PHASES OF THOUGHT 369 


‘inspired soothsayer, the raving madman, are momentarily pos- 
.sessed by god ordemon. The quick-witted plan, the impulsive 
-erime, are stimulated by Pallas Athene, or by the Erinnys,} 
which is impelling a man to his own destruction. Animism, in 
short, has a ready explanation for all the cases in which we seem 
‘to suffer or to act not wholly by and with our own will. But 
“what of our own spirits? Are they dependent upon the body 
or not? Clearly not altogether so, or they would not wander 
“away in dreams, nor would the soul escape at death with the 
last breath, nor live on while the body manifestly decays. Yet 
animism is far from being satisfied that the soul can do without 
some bodily support. Sometimes the corpse itself is necessary 
to the soul’s life, and is accordingly preserved with jealous care. 
The corpse remains quasi-animated. It can eat and drink. 
‘Its mutilation injures the spirit. If unburied it suffers from 
exposure and its spirit will cause a drought to protect it from the 
‘tain.2 It is as far as possible protected and preserved that the 
‘spirit may at the proper time rejoin it. But since in reality the 
‘corpse decays, what is the soul to do? Apparently it needs a 
body of one kind or another. The Australian ancestor of the 
._ Alcheringa deposited his soul in a pebble or oblong piece of wood. 
The Egyptian made likenesses of the deceased, statues and bas- 
‘reliefs, which the soul could inhabit. The Chinese make a tablet 
specially fitted for the dead man’s habitation by the accurate 
‘inscription of his name and all his titles. Among other peoples 
quite a different view is taken of the soul’s needs. Dimly con- 
ceived as a thin aerial substance, it is thought to require that 
the body, together with its food and raiment, should be reduced 
to the same form. So the corpse is burnt, and with it all that 
‘is devoted to the service of the dead. In all these cases, whether 
with the aid of the corpse or without it, whether in the neighbour- 
hood of the grave or in another world, or in both places at once, 
‘the soul is held to maintain a semi-independent existence, its 
happiness or misery being determined largely by the amount 
of attention paid to it by its descendants upon earth. There 
‘remains one other alternative frequently adopted and finally 
becoming the basis of a great religious system—that it should find 
itself a new home by passing into another being. It then belongs 
for life to the body which it inhabits, but it existed before the 
body and will survive it. There is a limited or partial inter- 


1 The &ry which is responsible for an act of folly or crime is implanted 
‘in the soul by the Fury which will avenge it (see, e.g. Odyssey, xv. 233). 
| Cf. Leist, pp. 320, 321; Tylor, 11. 126-131. 
2 De Groot, i, 57, 342; i. 918, etc. 
BB 


Ry 


370 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


, dependence. This limited interdependence we may take as the 

/ central idea around which animistic theories radiate. Soul and 
' body are two things, not one. But without soul, body decays, 
' and without some sort of body, real or fictitious, the soul appears 
_ to be, at best, enfeebled and miserable. 

WA Though the soul is so subtle and impalpable that it can transfer 

Atself without difficulty, or without betraying the change through 


i any physical or outward modifications, it is nevertheless capable. 


of being dealt with as we deal with visible and tangible objects. 
It may be tied with cords, or driven away with weapons, or, 

| since, after all, it has a modicum of intelligence, frightened away 

\with shouts and threats. When an Australian war party loses 
a man the spirit of the dead follows them back in the form of a 
bird, and is frightened off when they get home. A part of the 
ceremony of mourning is to beat the air—not as a symbol of the 
futility of human grief—but for the purposeful object of driving 
the ghost away, and the funeral is not complete till the spirit is 
frightened out of the camp and into the grave where it should 
lie. Half the world away we find the Guaycurus of Paraguay 
sallying forth with clubs to repel the storm spirit,? and we know 
from Herodotus that the Caunians, being disgusted with their 
gods, took bows and spears and drove them bodily out of the 
land with execrations and insults. As late as the conquest by 
the Spaniards, bad spirits were driven annually out of Cuzco, 
in Peru, by armed warriors.2 Demons may be caught and 
imprisoned, as among the hill tribes of Bengal,* or they may be 
expelled by charms, as when the llama’s blood is sprinkled to 
this day in Peru on a doorway to keep them out of the hut. The 
soul may be put away for safety into a tree,® as in the famous 
case of the Golden Bough, or, as it leaves the dead man, it may 
be induced to come back and re-incarnate itself in some child 
of the family. When the West African negro wakes with a 
headache or sickness he sends, Miss Kingsley tells us, for a doctor, 
who, promptly diagnosing his case as a loss of soul, proceeds to 
institute a search. In process of time the soul is duly caught, 
by methods best known to the doctor, brought in a box to the 

1 Spencer and Gillen, I. 493-506. 

2 Payne, i. 390. Among the Haytians the gods would shamelessly quit 
the tribe in case of misfortune, and were therefore secured by cotton ropes 
(2b., p. 319). 3 Payne, i. 391. 4 Reclus, Primitwe Folk, 301-303. 

5 De Groot (iv. 106) has a good story of a Chinese criminal ‘who could 
not be put to death because he had put his soul into a bottle. Three days 
after being decapitated his trunk and head had re-united themselves. But 
his mother, whom he had beaten, betrayed his secret, and on her advice the 


vase was broken, and after this the criminal was successfully flogged to 
death. 


—— 


THE EARLY PHASES OF THOUGHT 371 


sick man’s bed, and duly blown into him, to his mental comfort, 
and thereby, through the power of faith-healing, possibly to his 
ohysical restoration. 

_ /But the commonest evidence of the material character of the 
fii is its power of eating and drinking like an ordinary man. 
The gods of the Babylonians came about the sacrifice like flies ; 
the ghosts in Hades lapped the blood which Odysseus brought 
for them. The spirit of the place partakes of the drops of 
wine which are poured out from a cup. The dead man is a 
participant in the funeral feast. The only doubt here is whether 
she ghost eats the food or the ghost of the food.? Since the food 
does not actually disappear, the savage mind is put to some 
srouble on the point, and sometimes the difficulty seéms to have 
been the cause of scepticism. The question was put by a young 
Zulu in this way: ‘“ When we ask, ‘ What do the other Amadhlozi 
do, for in the morning we see all the meat?’ the old men say, 
“The Amatongo lick it,’ and we are unable to contradict them 
and are silent, for they are older than we are and tell us all things ; 
we listen, for we are told all things, and assent without seeing 
slearly whether they are true or not.” ? Such difficulties could 
be resolved by the theory that it was the soul of the sacrifice 
that went to the gods, as the Fijians hold, and so at a cannibal 
feast among them there is a double advantage, for while the men 
zat the body the gods eat the soul, and both are benefited alike. 
The dead wife of Periander told her husband that she was cold 
because her clothes had not been burnt, and she was only warm 
when he had made a holocaust of the wardrobes of the Corinthian 
women. The dead man’s horse is slain at his grave that the 
zhost of the one may ride the ghost of the other. The wife is 
sacrificed to a similar order of ideas, and sometimes, the principle 
being logically carried through, the weapons and implements of 
the deceased are broken before they are laid beside him. 

The spirit being thus materialized appears to enjoy an in- 
lependent existence of its own. Here we touch the central 
sontradiction of animism. The conception of the soul has its 
justification either (a) in the facts of consciousness, or (6) in the 
aws of the living body, or in both combined. In either case it is 


‘ 

+ Miss Kingsley, West African Studies, p. 200. 

2 Strictly speaking there is a third alternative—the corpse itself may eat 
the food. This appears to have been the primitive Chinese conception, 
which by the time of Confucius had yielded to the somewhat more refined 
view that the food placed on the grave was destined for the soul. Hence 
wose the custom of placing the offerings upon the tomb instead of within it 
De Groot, vol. ii. p. 384). 

3 Tylor, ii. 387. 


| 
j 
f 

: 
t 
\ 


372 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


contrasted with the notion of body as such, for consciousness has_ 
no bodily attributes and the laws observable in bodies are not. 
bodies. Yet for animism the soul turns out to be another body— | 
a visible and material thing—only thinner and less palpable— 
mere “‘double’’ of the appearances which it should explain, 

/ For the primitive mind cannot grasp an object of thought without | 


transforming it into an object of sense. It needs a principle, 


connecting things that it can see or hear, and by a confusion of 
categories it makes of it merely another thing that it can see and 
hear. 

(b)..Z'he.sub-human soul.—If the soul of man is materialized by 
animism, the bodies of other beings are in return spiritualized. 
A familiar and widespread, though probably not a universal 
development of animism, is that which sees spirits everywhere, 
not one spirit that underlies all things, but separate spirits 
underlying all manner of things as the efficient causes of their 
qualities and actions.1 <A stone, a tree, a blade of grass, the 
wind, an animal, a human being, a mountain, a river, the 
sea, the sky, the sun, the rain, an epidemic disease—any or 
all of these may be conceived by the savage mind as the 
dwelling-place or the manifestation, as the case may be, of 
a spiritual agency which controls their behaviour; and this 
spiritual agency may be the object of fear or worship, of prayer 
and supplication, possibly of cajolement or abuse, finally of 


1 While the belief in the soul of man is probably universal, the question 
how far the conception is extended to inanimate things by primitive races 
is one to which it would be hazardous to give any general answer. If the 
tendency to attribute all actions to a spirit were erected into an avowed 
principle, and consistently applied, everything capable of being conceived 
as a distinct object would become also the seat of aspirit. That this would 
involve much duplication and, so to say, overlapping, would present no 
difficulty to the animistic mode of thought, which does in fact frequently 
conceive a greater object as animated by one spirit, while the lesser objects 
which form its parts have each a spirit of its own. Thus, among the Chinese, 
‘“‘one of man’s chief gods is the Shen, pervading the Earth as a single 
entity : and those which dwell in its several parts, its mountains, hills, 
rivers, meres, rocks and stones, are likewise his divinities’? (De Groot, 
vol. iv. p. 325). The conception, if we try to think it out, raises questions 
of identity and of individuality which might puzzle us, but probably do 
not puzzle primitive man. Be this as it may, the tendency to people things 
with spirits in indiscriminate profusion is widespread if not universal in 
the primitive world. For numerous instances see Frazer, Golden Bough, 
vol. lii. p. 43 seq.; e.g. “The Mantras, an aboriginal race of the Malay 
Peninsula, ‘ find or put a spirit everywhere, in the air they breathe, in the 
land they cultivate, in the forests they inhabit, in the trees they cut down, 
in the caves of the rocks. According to them, the demon is the cause of 
everything that turns outill. If they are sick, a demon is at the bottom of 
it; if an accident happens, it is still the spirit who is at work; thereupon the 
demon takes the name of the particular evil of which he is supposed to be 
the cause’ ”’ (Frazer, 2nd ed. ili. 48). 












THE EARLY PHASES OF THOUGHT 373 


Lactual physical violence. Naturally, not all spirits move men 
,alike. Harmless inanimate things are seldom at this stage the 
| objects of much solicitude, unless by some accident of belief they 
|are associated with a powerful spirit for some special reason. 
‘Thus, among the 7’shi of the West African coast, everything 
.is supposed to be animated by indwelling spirits, but little 
_attention is paid to the spirits of bushes, grasses, stones. More 
_dangerous ones, as the spirits of the rivers and lagoons, the sea, 
_the mountains, are the objects to which the Tshi cult devotes 
‘attention! Nevertheless, spirits may inhabit the most un- 
promising exterior; thus an essential part of Australian belief 
is the indwelling of spirits in certain objects, generally oblong 
pebbles? called “churinga.’’ But these fall within the explana- 
tion hinted above, for they were stones carried about by the men 
-of the Alcheringa, the ancestors of the “ great long-ago,” who 
, deposited their souls in them and left them by some tree or cave, 
|from whence at times they pass into the children of the present 
generation. Aino spirits inhabit curiously peeled sticks. The 
| Waralis worship a stone smeared with ghi, but “there is some- 
| thing more there than the stone.”? It is far more congenial to our 


1 Ellis, Yoruba-speaking Peoples, p. 276. 

2 Stone-worship must be ranked among the most paradoxical develop- 
| ments of animism—a stone being to our minds the very type of the in- 
animate. Jevons (History of Religion, pp. 131-144) inclines to think that 
it is in most cases derivative, the stone having been originally an altar, 

but admits (p. 137) that the worship of remarkably shaped rocks would 
belong to primitive animism. Sir A. Lyall (Asiatic Studies, First Series, 
_p. 12) ascribes the primitive worship of stones in India “‘ to that simple 
awe of the unusual which belongs to no particular religion.’”’> We have 
here something simpler and more primitive than animism itself, to which 
further reference will be made later. The next stage is that the stone is the 
dwelling-place of aspirit. Ata higher stage it is connected by a myth with 
some “saint, demi-god, or full-blown deity.”’ Finally, it may remain in 
a spiritual religion as a mere symbol. Sir A. Lyall “‘ knew a Hindu officer 
of great shrewdness and very fair education, who devoted several hours 
daily to the elaborate worship of five round pebbles, which he had appointed 
to be his symbol of omnipotence. Although his general belief was in one 
all-pervading Divinity, he must have something symbolic to handle and 
address’ (Asiatic Studies, First Series, p. 13). These would-no doubt be 
_the regular five stones ‘‘ supposed to be instinct with the divine essence ”’ 
of southern Brahmanism (Moore, Hist. Rel., p. 347). For a discussion 
of the fetichistic and symbolic views of stone-worship, see also Tylor, 
| Primitive Culture (ed. 1903), vol. ii. p. 160. Whatever its character, stone- 
worship as an element in early religion is widespread. De la Saussaye 
(Manual of the Science of Religion, Eng. Trs. i. 85 ff.) finds it among the 
South Sea Islanders, in Central Asia, among the Finns, Laps, Negroes, 
ancient Peruvians, Hindoos, ancient Hebrews, ancient Arabs, Greeks, 
Romans, in the Hebrides and in mediwval Europe, and while recognizing 
the blend, hard to distinguish, of the altar, the fetich and the symbol, is 
inclined to conclude that the safest explanation of the cult is the Tacitean 
“ratio in obscuro.”’ 
* Wilson, J.R.A.S., 1843. 





374 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


ways of thinking to worship the thunder god with the Hidatsa, to 
believe in sylvan deities with the Burmese, and to people caverns 

and whirlpools with spirits like the Congolese. It is natural for 

us to regard the human soul as the model on which the spirits of 

animals, plants and inanimate objects are formed, and in a sense 

it isso. For it is, of course, the experience of mental life within’ 
the self that gives meaning to all ideas of a mental life without. 
But we are hardly to suppose that the idea of the separate soul 
in man is first formed and that by a reflective process a corre- 
sponding double is attributed to material things by way of 

explaining their notions. Such attribution is logic, though an. 

imperfect and uncritical logic, and logic plays but a secondary 

part in primitive thinking. Probably the earlier stage is that 

which merely treats inanimate things as though they were alive, 

and plants and animals as though they were human, without 

attributing to them a separable spirit. This is the stage called 

Animatism +—the theory that things are alive, or still more 

strictly, the practice of treating them as alive—as distinguished 

from the theory that they are the abode of spirits. The dis- 

tinction is rather one of degree than of principle. Animism is 

animatism made more concrete and definite. For the very 

fact that “‘ prayers ’”’ or incantations are addressed to a being 

is proof that he is regarded as understanding them: that if 

sacrifices are offered him he is held capable of receiving them 
and enjoying them—in a word, that he is to that extent a living 

being and manlike. 


_“%t is characteristic of early thought that fundamental dis- 


a 


‘ tinctions like those of mind and matter are not yet clearly drawn. 


Men, animals, plants and the inanimate world are therefore 


‘\ much more nearly on a level than they are for us. It is this 


which makes possible that mystic bond between a human being 
or a group of human beings on the one side and a non-human 
object on the other which, whatever its origin, is the essence of 
totemism. It is the same condition of thought which disposes 
men to approach nature in the same spirit and manner in which 
they deal with one another. If original mazdaism sacrificed 
butter to fire without conceiving it as anything but the material 
fire that its worshippers saw, this only shows that the process of 
distinction between a living thing that can be gratified by food, 
and a fire that can only consume it, had not begun. Yet im- 
plicitly the fire is already treated as living and understanding, | 
and this “implicit” animism would then be merely the lowest 
stage of the development; and would grow into animism proper 
1 A term due to Mr. R. R. Marett, cf. The Threshold of Religion, ii. 14. 


THE EARLY PHASES OF THOUGHT 375 


aS soon as its implications became realized, so that in sacrificing 
_ to fire men began avowedly to treat fire as a living thing.1 
_/ Animism in the narrower sense can only be attributed to a 
_fpeople when we have explicit information as to their modes of 
Ithought. But _animatism.can be readily inferred from their 
cult. If they make offerings to the sun, a tree, or a stone, they 
are treating sun, tree or stone like intelligent beings, whether 
they regard them as possessing separable spirits or not. If 


_ we allow ourselves-to-use animism in a generic sense to include—~ 


all beliefs and practices which treat the inanimate, the vegetable, 
_or the animal as if they-were~human;~we~shall--find’ traces of 


ourselves, and the “spiritual ’? expresses that higher sphere of 
_ being into which man enters by virtue of what is best in him 
and what is most removed from the material and the animal. 
_ Such conceptions as these underlie all the higher religions, but 
they are wholly foreign to animism. Essentially the cult of 
animism is not an adoration of a being higher than man, but 
a mode of influencing beings conceived as possessing powers 
| which may be useful or harmful to the believer. And spirit, as 
animism conceives it, though certainly implying enough of in- 
telligence to comprehend the meaning of a promise or threat, is 
far from implying a higher type of moral or mental power than 
that of the human “ worshipper.’’ We are accustomed to think 
of the rudest religions as anthropomorphic, and to say that man 
first framed gods in his own image. But in truth the majority 
of the beings worshipped by primitive man are not human, but 
something less than human. The distinctly evil agencies are 
more prominent than the good, for why should savage man 
trouble himself to please great spirits who are naturally benevo- 
lent? It is the bad spirit who will otherwise make himself 
troublesome that the savage is anxious to conciliate with the 


1 Of the early Roman cults Mr. Warde Fowler writes : ‘‘ Vesta seems to 
be the fire, Penates the store, or at least spirits indistinguishable from the 
substance composing the store ”’ (Religious Experience of the Roman People, 
p. 116). Which precisely they were could only be told if we had contem- 
porary literature or art to explain the precise manner in which the cult was 
understood. On the other hand, that they were not personalities “* perfectly 
distinct from the object ”’ in which they resided is quite clear (1b.). The 
passage illustrates the relative sharpness of the upper limit of animism 
(see below, p. 402) and the vagueness of the lower boundary where it passes 
into animatism. 


376 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


best of his store.t And the intellectual level is as low as the | 


moral. The savage is confident in his power to deceive the spirit 
whom he addresses by methods which could hardly take in the 
savage man himself. The Naga propitiates a malignant deity by 
setting out for him a small fowl in a large basket. The god is 
deceived by the size of the basket, and distributes favours 
accordingly.2, The ghost of a mother who would carry off her 
child is deceived in the Banks Islands by a piece of banana trunk 
which is laid on her bosom in her grave.? Disease demons may 
be diverted by similar methods. Thus, in an epidemic, the Dyaks 
set up wooden images at the doors of their dwellings, that the 
disease may carry them off instead of the living people. When 
the Kaffir is hunting an elephant, he begs the elephant not to 
tread on him—surely as curious a confusion of ideas as is to be 
found in primitive thought—for, on the one hand, the elephant’s 
soul is held to have intelligence enough to understand the petition, 
and, on the other hand, it is supposed to be so stupid as to be 
taken in by the request when the petitioner is all the while seeking 
to take his life. The Samoyeds are more crafty, for they tell the 
bear that it was the Russians who killed him; and the North 
American Indians spare the rattlesnake, risking the physical 
evils which they know, in dread of the vengeance which the 
rattlesnake’s spirit would take on them, and which they do not 
know and cannot measure.® The crude conception of the spiritual 
which these cases vividly illustrate goes far to determine both 
the objects and the methods of animistic cults. Animal-gods and 
man-gods belong to the animistic level of religion, because it is 
only at this level that animals or men can be the objects of a cult 
without being regarded as the representations or embodiments 
of something far higher than themselves. Animism does indeed 
regard them as embodiments of a spirit, but this spirit is not 
essentially superior, either morally or intellectually, to the 
animal or man in which it dwells. The Toda addresses a cow, 
chosen by descent or by consecration to be the head of the herd, 

1 For illustrations, see below, p. 425. 

2 Godden, J. A. J., xxvi. 187. 

3 Golden Bough, 2nd ed. vol. ii. p. 345, where numerous instances of the 
same kind are given. The widespread substitution of models for real food, 
implements, etc., in sacrifices to the dead is hardly to be regarded as a 
deception—or, if so, rather as a form of self-deception—the model, pardon- 
ably enough on animistic grounds, being held as good a vehicle for soul-food, 
soul-money, etc., as a real loaf or a gold piece. 

4 ib., 348. 

5 Tylor, vol. i. p. 467; Schoolcraft-Drake, vol. i. p. 232. Similarly the 


Western Eskimo, before setting to upon the stranded whale, would 
receive him with divine honours, harangue and compliment him (Reclus, 


p. 52) 


THE EARLY PHASES OF THOUGHT 377 






‘as being herself a goddess: “ How fair was thy mother ! how 
‘much milk she gave! Be not less generous! Henceforth thou 
shalt be a divinity among us. .. . Bear a thousand calves!”’} 
So sacred is this divinity that the chief milkman is himself a 
‘man-god. Yet the animal which is worshipped is also unhesi- 
tatingly turned to human uses. Often the god may, with due 
observance of the proper solemnities, be killed and eaten by 
his votaries. Thus, among the Australians, at the Intichiuma 
‘ceremonies a man not only may, but must, eat his totem, or the 
supply would fail.2 The Gilyaks of Eastern Siberia bring up a 
‘bear cub with divine honours. Fish, brandy and other things 
are offered to him in every house. People prostrate themselves 
before him, and his entrance into a house confers a blessing, 
but he is also teased and worried. Aiter visiting every house in 
the village, he is shot dead with arrows and eaten.* In such 
practices, illustrations of which might be indefinitely multiplied, 
the savage is, in his way, getting the best of both worlds. He 
needs the animal’s flesh and is afraid of his spirit. Not only 
may the particular bear which he has killed have its avenging 
ghost, but all the bears may stand together in the blood feud 
and take vengeance on the murderer of their kinsman. So he 
pays honour to the individual bear slain, and through him to 
his fellow-bears. He comforts himself, in short, with a con- 
ception of the bear spirit which is intelligent enough to under- 
stand the show of honours and the words of cajolery, and stupid 
enough to let these make up to it for the hard facts of being 
killed and eaten.* © 

The worship of men might seem intrinsically higher than 
that of animals. But in point of fact no distinction of principle 
severs the cult of man-gods in many primitive religions from 

1 Reclus, p. 218. 

2 Spencer and Gillen, vol. i. p. 168. When the Australian does not eat 
the totem himself, it is by his permission that others do so. In fact, he is 
held responsible for maintaining the supply of his totem for the benefit of 
other totem-groups (Spencer and Gillen, vol. ii. p. 160). Strictly, the 
totem should not be spoken of as a god, the conception being magical rather 
than religious, but the point here is the ceremonial eating of that which is 
ordinarily sacred. 

8 Golden Bough, vol. ii. p. 380. For many other instances of killing and 
eating the divine or sacred animal, see the same work, vol. ii. pp. 302, 366, 
396, 435. 

4 The slain animal, if properly treated, may even invite others to come 
and be killed. The Orinoco Indians, having killed an animal, pour a little 
liquor into its mouth, ‘‘ that the soul of the dead beast may inform its 
fellows of the welcome it has met with, and that they, too, cheered by the 
prospect of the same kind reception, may come with alacrity to be killed ”’ 
(Golden Bough, vol. ii. p. 402). Many similar instances are given by Mr. 
Frazer. 


378 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


that of animals as just described. The man-god of this stage 
‘must not be confused with the anthropomorphic deity of poly- 
theism and the cruder monotheism. This deity is a spirit 
conceived as clad with human attributes. The man-god is an 
ordinary human being conceived as the incarnation of a powerful 
spirit or as possessed of magical powers. In the lowest grade 
he is merely a sorcerer, whose power is due to his relations with 
ghosts and other spirits. At a further stage of development 
he has marvellous powers of his own whereby he controls rain 
and sunshine, the winds and the crops. Owing to the occult 
influence emanating from him, this mighty being becomes so 
full of danger to his people that his movements and actions have 
to be closely restricted. To drink of his cup or eat the remnants 
of his food is fatal. His touch and his glance are deadly. His 
misbehaviour may involve his whole people in ruin. In con- 
sequence he is surrounded with all kinds of precautions, and he 
ends by being a mere puppet in the hands of priests. Thus 
the Egyptian Pharaoh, a typical man-god, is described by 
Diodorus? as hedged round both in his public and private life by 
watchful sacerdotal control which minutely prescribed to him 
the order of his actions. Similarly at Babylon, though the king 
was not strictly a god, the whole country suffered for his faults 
and he had to observe taboos—e. g. avoiding meat on the seventh 
day—which apparently concerned no one else.® 

/ Lastly, the man-god may be the incarnation of a spirit which 
/lives independently of him. Of such a type the most familiar 
instance to us is the everlasting Buddha of the Thibetans. In 
this idea of incarnation death and re-birth necessarily play an 
important part. The gods themselves die in the philosophy of 
animism, for death is only the migration of a spirit. Some- 
times it is its migration to better quarters, and when this flesh 
that is now the spirit’s habitation becomes old and weak or is 
doing its work ill, the worshippers of the god facilitate his migra-~ 
tion by the destruction of his temporary tabernacle. The man- 
god, in fact, may be killed and even eaten like any ordinary 
human being.* 

1 For instances, see Golden Bough, 2nd ed. i. 139, ete. 

2 Diodorus, i. 70, 71. 

3 Jastrow, "Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, pp. 375-378. For many 
similar instances, see Golden Bough, i. 313, 314. 

4 See Golden Bough, 2nd ed. vol. ii. p. 6, etc. A special case is the selec- 
tion of a prisoner, criminal or slave, to act as the incarnation of'a deity. He 
then becomes a temporary man-god, receives honours and sacrifices, and is 
finally slain and perhaps eaten. The idea is apparently to strengthen the 


spirit—who is here some nature-god—by sacrifices, perhaps to bind him 
more closely to his worshippers by the partaking of his flesh, and finally, by 


THE EARLY PHASES OF THOUGHT 379 


[tris unceremonious treatment of the object of worship is 
‘partly due to the conception that the body in which the spirit 
‘is incarnate is not the spirit itself. But the condition under 
‘which alone it can arise is that the object of a religious cult is 
‘not yet an object of worship as we understand the term. The 
‘spirit of the sacred animal does not rise above the animal. The 
god in man has powers which ordinary men have not, but he is 
‘not spiritually (as we use that term) a higher being. The spirits 
of early religion may be abused or coerced if they do not do 
their duty. The Greek youths whipped the statue of Pan if 
he did not give them good hunting. The Chinese emperor was 
‘supreme over all spirits except that of heaven, and regularly 
promoted or degraded them in rank according to their perform- 
-ances.! The Ainu abuse their household gods when a death 
occurs, as is shown in a vivid description by Mr. Batchelor of 
the scene in a house on the death of a child. 


~ “QOne old man was calling on the goddess of Fire to help, and 
threatening never to worship her again if she did not keep warmth 
‘in the child’s body. Another person was looking out of the east 
window and accusing the goddess of Fire to the Creator, of not 
attending to herduty. A third was in a towering rage, and, facing 
the south-east corner of the hut, was telling the guardian gods 
that they were an extremely bad lot, and deserved never to be 
worshipped again.” 2 


It is not necessary to multiply instances. The quasi-material 
spirit of animistic worship, whether incarnate in stocks and 
stones, in trees, animals or men, or roaming disembodied as a 
ghost, demon, or genius, is not intrinsically a higher being 
before whom man must prostrate himself, but more often, if 
anything, a being of a lower order, and in any case one who is 
to be managed as occasion serves, by prayer, entreaty, deception, 
threats, or force applied as we apply them to actual men and 
‘animals, so that when one fails another is tried. 

Such, then, is the character of the primitive conception of 
‘Le In its most definite shape it is a double of the common 
objects of perception, conceived on the one hand as a material 
BD sbstance capable of exerting force and having force applied to 











slaying him, to give him a new and more vigorous life. The subject is 
exhaustively treated by Mr. Frazer. See the places quoted, and, in par- 
ticular, vol. iii. p. 134, for the killing of the god in Mexico. 

1 For examples, see Douglas, Society in China, pp. 5-7. The honours 
paid to ancestors for the exploits of their descendants depend on the same 
conception, since it is the business of an ancestral spirit to watch over his 
family and guard its fortunes. 

2 Batchelor, The Ainu of Japan, p. 217. 


380 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


it, and on the other hand as feeling and thinking like a rather 
stupid man, and open, like him, to supplication, exhortation, or 
intimidation—a standing contradiction in which the categories 
of mental and material are hopelessly intertwined, in which mere 
functions and qualities become substantial beings, and, finally, 
by a crude induction, the same spiritual agency by which men 
explain their own behaviour and that of their fellows is imputed 
also to animals, plants, and inanimate nature—to the wind and 
waves—the stocks and stones. In its less definite shapes these 
contradictions do not appear. But that is not because they have 
been faced and surmounted, but rather because the first step of 
distinctly conceiving the elements which have to be reconciled 
has not yet been taken. 


y 3. One way of treating things in the primitive world, then, is 
‘to act as if they were alive, and indeed in the end to regard them 
as inhabited by spirits. Another way is to treat things as united 
‘by certain occult connections—connections, that is, which are 
neither apparent to the senses nor legitimately inferred from data 
of sense, and yet present no problem to primitive man. Such 
occult connections are the instruments of magic—not magic 
itself, but, so to say, the materia magica. ‘They do not involve 
spirits, and in using them the magician is free from that particular 
element of uncertainty which is derived from the caprice of any 
voluntary agent.1 But it is a mistake to infer that they imply 
any theory of mechanical causation or of the uniformity of 
nature. Strictly, they imply no theory at all as operating in the 
mind of primitive man, but only a certain way of forming ideas 
or of guiding action in the service of practical needs. The 
anthropologist can analyze out the principle implied—that is, he 
can-formulate a law of causation which, if true, would justif 
the procedure, and which, being, in fact, false, renders.it- voids, 
This it is convenient to do for the better understanding of the 
matter, and we shall immediately distinguish such laws. But 

s ‘laws,’ it cannot be too clearly understood, these are the 
work, not of the primitive magician, but of the anthropologist, 
and they are of use only to exhibit the nature of the confusion 
on which magic rests. 


1 The modern theory of law has been built up in opposition to one of 
causation by arbitrary will. Hence it is natural for us to impute notions— 
at least implicit notions—of law to any theory of practice which dispenses 
with will. But in application to-men who have no such history behind 
them this is a misleading inference. The magical process has no automatic 
certainty. This is proved by the constant piling of one process on to 
another, and by the necessity for some special power inherited or acquired 
in the magician for all important cases (see below, p. 398). 


THE EARLY PHASES OF THOUGHT 381 


| This being understood, we may distinguish three main ‘ prin- 
ciples ’’ or laws underlying magiealprocesses. We have, first, 
‘what is now called Contagious Magic. 
_ Its principle may be roughly formulated, ‘‘ What is done to 
_my belongings is done to me ’—or more precisely, if two things 
, are closely connected (as e.g. by being parts of one object) they 
- will, even when dissevered, remain so allied, so much in “‘ sym- 
, pathy,” that to affect one of them is to affect the other.2 The 
, most familiar instance is the use of hair-clippings and nail-parings 
, to work evil on the man to whom they belonged. Another is the 
_ practice of heating a weapon which has made a wound in order 
that the wound may remain inflamed, or conversely, of keeping 
the weapon clean that the wound may not fester. A third is to 
operate on the food left by a man.? A fourth is to attack his 
“shadow. A fifth is to possess his name, for the true name is the 
-man. It is impossible to say how primitive man actually con- 
ceives the connection in these cases, for it is of the essence of the 
_ matter that he has no clear conception at all. But if we analyze 
out the principle implied—that is to say, the principle which, if it 
were true, would justify the procedure, and which, being in fact 
false, makes the procedure void—it is this—that the continuous 
identity which once connected the two things still in some sort 
persists. The clipped hair was once part of the man and his 
identity persists in it. The sword and the wound were two 
aspects of the same fact and their union remains. If this were 
true, sympathetic magic would be a genuine art, and because it 
is not true, sympathetic magic is a spurious art. In this sense 
the doctrine of a persistent unreal identity is the implied principle 
of sympathetic magic. 

A second form of magic rests on another distortion of the 
principle of identity. If you-cannot-get-hold_of any belongings 
of your enemy you can at least make a likeness of him: You 
may destroy him, for instanee;"by melting or sticking pins into 
a@ wax image of him. With very different intent, though by 
essentially the same method, primitive people in many parts of 

the world seek to. make rain by squirting water, or to produce 
sunshine by kindling fires, or fertility by a representation of the 





1 Golden Bough, i. 52, etc. With regard to this name it must be borne 
in mind that in the cases in question there is no present contact. There 
has been contact or some such connection in the past, and in consequence 
an occult sympathy remains. Contagion, in the more ordinary sense of 
the propagation of a quality from one thing to another by contact or 
proximity, appears in the third group of cases distinguished lower down. 

2 See Golden Bough, i. 9, 49. 

3 Or an excrement (Spencer and Gillen, I. 547). 


= 


382 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


processes of growth. Here the implied principle—understand- 
ing the term once again as above—is that like things or like 
processes are the same. In making rain on a small scale we are 
setting up a process which extends further and has to do with 
the production of rain generally, or, at any rate, on a greater 
scale. In slaying one bear, again, or in honouring one bear, we 
are slaying or honouring Bear—the bear that is in all bears; 
we are incurring or averting a feud with bears in general. It 
will help us to understand this sort of identification if we revert 
for a moment to the creed of totemism, the idea at the base of 
which is, as we have seen, that there is an occult connection 
between an animal or plant and the human beings of a clan or 
tribe, such that what they act. or perform ceremonially the 
totem will do likewise in real earnest. The totem is in some 
sense—in what sense they certainly could not tell, and if we try 
to define the conception we shall modify it by the very process 
of making it definite—but it 1s in some sense incarnate in them. 
The Bear is in all bears, all four-footed bears and all human 
bears. But what is the Bear itself? To the North American 
Indian it is often a Big Brother of the bears; another individual, 
in short, and something on its way to becoming a god. But in 
a lower stage the totem has no need of so much individuality, 
for the savage has not got so far in the endeavour to think out 
the problem of Identity in Difference. Every individual bear, 
two-footed or four-footed, is alike the Bear, and what one does 
or suffers all do or suffer. Further, the identity may be fortified, 
as it were, by introducing the other principle of connection. 
For, since things that are once joined are always connected, an 
exchange of blood makes two men brothers. Joining in the 
same meal has a similar effect, and therefore what one suffers 
the others, too, will feel, not through moral sympathy but through 
a purely physical causation. Applying this to the totem, how 
can we identify ourselves with him better than by killing him ? 
We eat the flesh of the bear and the Bear is within us. Yet we 
have not injured the totem, for the Bear still lives—in other 
bears and in us. The species survives, though one individual is 


sacrificed. ae 
_-Fhese-two_ forms of magic, distinguished’ as Contagious and 
Homeopathic, are grouped together as Sympathetic.) That is, 
they both depend on an occult Sympathy—in other words, a 
very crudely conceived identity between things and processes 


+ Cf. the symbolic processes combined with invitations to the animal in 


the totemic ceremonies whereby the Australians secure a full supply of the — 


Witchetty grub (Spencer and Gillen, I. pp. 172 seq. and 206). 





‘THE EARLY PHASES OF THOUGHT 383 


‘that are really distinct. The third set of magical ideas are 
simpler, and turn on a primitive conception of the qualities of 
‘things. Powers and influences exist in things, and are the basis 
of their qualities and behaviour. Like spirits, they are separable 
‘from the things to which they belong. They can be withdrawn 
-by charms; they can be transferred to other things. A’ barren 
‘fruit-tree must be a male. A woman’s petticoat placed upon it 
transfers to it the feminine quality, and it becomes fruitful. 
Chinese people, when advancing in years, have their grave- 
slothes prepared by young girls, because part of their capacity 
to live long must pass into the clothes and so put off the moment 
when they will be required.1 Conversely, when the coffin is 
being nailed down the hammer is bound up in red cloth to 
prevent bad influences passing into the hand.2, Now conceptions 
of this sort seem, in the first place, to be merely generalizations, 
ymich are too extensive and therefore faulty, from an ordinary 
experience. Some qualities or characteristics of things are in a 
sense transmissible. Death as such is not infectious, but small- 
pox is. The touch of a pregnant woman will not impart her 
fertility, but her warm hand willimpart warmth. But there is 
probably a little more in the matter than a too hasty generaliza- 
tion. There is the conception of a quality as something quasi- 
substantial, something, in short, bearing a family resemblance 
to the spirit from which we have to distinguish it. When sins 
are loaded upon a scapegoat and driven away into the wilder- 
ness, when a toothache is nailed into a tree, when a disease is 
extracted in the form of a magic stone, or passed into a third 
person, when evil influences are brushed or whipped off a man— 
in all such cases the quality is treated as something that you 
can almost pick up and carry about. It is at least as substantial 
as vapour, and in some cases it really becomes a spirit. When 
the Meijanesian regards a stone with little discs in it as “‘ good 
to bring in money,” it is clearly because it has the character 
of money stamped upon it. But this character they ascribe 
themselves to an indwelling spirit which they conciliate—the 
magical quality passes into the spiritual.? The third basis of 
magic may, in fact, be regarded as a spirit that has become 
attenuated into an “influence,” or as an “influence ”’ that has 
not developed into a spirit. It thus forms a connecting link 
between magic and animism. 


4. The other two forms grouped under Sympathetic Magic in 
he wider sense are not so closely connected with animism. Yet 
1 De Groot, 1. 60. 2)40,, p. 96. 3 Golden Bough, 2nd ed. i. 45. 


384 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


they belong in the main to the same mental level. We find in 
the primitive mind when it begins to theorize two tendencies 
which may be regarded as in a measure complementary. On 
the one hand, it tends to take the characters and attributes of 
things, processes that go on in things, thoughts about things 
and the words in which thoughts are expressed, and to turn 
them into objects, substantial as the things themselves, having, 
in fact, a mode of existence very like the things. The categories 
of substance and attribute are not yet distinguished. Of this 
confusion personification is merely the extreme case, the living 
person being simply the most concrete and many-sided of objects. 
In this tendency, then, we have the basis of the spirits of anim- 
ism and the occult essences and powers of magic. On the other 
side, the primitive mind equally fails to keep different objects 
distinct. One conception melts readily into another, just as in 
primitive fancy a sorcerer turns into a dragon, a mouse, a stone, 
and a butterfly without the smallest difficulty. Hence similarity 
is treated as if it were physical identity. The physical indi- 
viduality of things is not observed. ‘The fact that a thing was 
mine makes it appear as though there were something of me 
in it, so that by burning it you make me smart. The borders 
and limits of things are not marked out, but their influence and 
their capacity to be influenced extends, as it were, in a misty 
halo over everything connected with them in any fashion. If 
the attributes of things are made too solid and material in 
primitive thought, things themselves are too fluid and undefined, 
passing into each other by loose and easy identifications which 
‘prevent all clear and crisp distinctions of thought. In a word, 
‘primitive thought has not yet evolved those distinctions of 
substance and attribute, quality and relation, cause and effect, 
identity and differénce, which are the common property of civil- 
ized thought. These categories, which among us every child 
soon comes to distinguish in practice,! are for primitive thought 
undistinguished, and this indistinctness is the intellectual basis _ 
of animism and of magic. 

‘his indistinctness finds its general explanation in the-stage of | 
/psychological evolution attained by primitive man. The generic 
function of mind in life is to establish articulate connections 
between the scattered portions of experience, and so enable its 
possessors to learn from the past how to provide for the future. 


1 I do not mean that the child or the average unthinking man is familiar 
with these conceptions in the abstract, but that his experience is SO organ- 
ized under the influence of tradition, especially in the form of language, — 
as to fall with general, though not unvarying, correctness into the pigeon-— 
holes to which these terms correspond. 


p 


Sa ae 


THE EARLY PHASES OF THOUGHT 385 


By its success in performing that function the stage of growth 
reached by the mind of any given being or group of beings is 
to be judged. The higher animals have apparently reached so 
far that they can perceive the objects that surround them in 
their temporal and spatial order, and use the result of this per- 
ception in guiding their own actions so as to produce or avert 
particular effects. If this is so, they certainly in a sense appre- 
hend many of the attributes, actions and relations of things. 
In some sense my dog, when he is thirsty, knows that there is 
water in a jug, that I can pour it out for him, and that he can 
get me to do so by attracting my attention and signifying his 
wants. That is to say, his behaviour is adapted to the presence 
around him of certain persons and things with given attributes, 
related in a particular way, acting in a particular way. He 
knows this after some fashion, but we do not take it to be pre- 
cisely man’s fashion. Where, then, do we suppose the difference 
to lie? The dog can in some way differentiate the “solid ”’ 
jug from the “liquid”’ water, for we see that he treats them 
differently. But we suppose it to be peculiar to the man that 
he interests himself in the generic qualities in point of which 
these things differ, and invents for them the names “solid ” 
and ‘“‘liquid.”” To discover and define these qualities the human 
mind breaks up its experiences into their elements, and at the 
Same time and in the same process brings widely separated 
experiences together. The “solid,” for instance, is something 
common to the jug, the house, the road, and distinct from the 
air and the water, distinct also from the shape and other qualities 
of the jug. This joint movement of comparison and discrimi- 
nation breaks up the perceptual world into its elements and 
builds up out of them an order of ideas. Every such idea is 
expressed in a general term or name, and as there is a name for 
each thing, so there is a way of expressing each of its functions, 
attributes, relations. Our everyday experience thus translated 
into ideas falls into certain familiar categories— Things and 
their Attributes, Persons and their Actions, Functions, Rela- 
tions, Substances, Causes and Effects. But these categories do 
not at once emerge into clear consciousness. The mind uses 
them long before it is clearly aware of them. Or, more strictly, 
‘it works by rules corresponding to these conceptions, sorting 
experiences in a manner which accords with them, though it 
knows them not. It recognizes actual substances (stones, hills, 
men, horses) and their attributes or actions (hardness, height, 
sagacity, swift movement) before it has ever heard of Sub- 
stances or Attributes or Relations as general terms, and a clear- 
cc 





386 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


headed man who is innocent either of grammar or logic may yet 
move among the objects of experience without confounding any 
of these categories. Thus, below the stage at which the mind 
is clearly aware of the elementary conceptions under which 
rational experience is ordered, there is a stage where it works 
according to the rules to which these conceptions, when known, 
are found to lead, though without consciousness of the rules 
or the conceptions. This is the stage of “common sense.” 
But below ‘‘common sense,” again, is a stage in which the rules 
themselves are not yet efficient in their operation, at which the 
mind is not only unconscious of the categories, but fails practi- 
cally in sorting experiences so as to accord with them, in which 
objects of thought belonging to different categories are not held 
apart but pass into each other, what is now a substance becom- 
ing at another moment a relation, while a relation or an attribute 
becomes a substance, or one relation is confounded with another. 
At this stage, though “ general” ideas are already formed, they 
are loose in meaning and wavering in application. And this is 
the natural result of the methods by which they are formed. 
Developed thought knows certain rigorous methods of induction 
from experience, as well as certain definite principles of the 
analysis and synthesis of ideas whereby it forms new concep- 
tions or checks those that it has formed. Primitive thought 
knows nothing of such safeguards. In the lowest strata of 
thought-operations we form ideas by casual association, drifting 
where the current of mental tendency leads us, for the most 
part, under the spell of the emotional or practical interest. 
Instead of the rigorous analyses and constructions of the logical 
mind we have the unregulated movement—the resultant expres- 
sion, probably, of the unsifted mass of experience—carrying us 
whithersoever it will. As to the test of experience, if used at 
all, it is applied in the form in which any chance instance that 
appears to confirm the mental prepossession is taken for proof, 
and if an instance to the contrary is regarded at all it is merely 
as the starting-point for some hypothesis to explain it away. 
Indeed, the bare conception of truth or falsity scarcely exists. 
Fhe-world of ideas is largely a world of make-believe. If the 
child’s doll or the savage’s ghost~eannot-really eat the food | 
offered them, the human playmate or worshipper is quite con- 
tent to eat them himself ‘‘for’’ the other. The ideas make 
their junction, as it were, in their own world, and out of this. 
the child savage derives the mental comfort he requires. As to. 
_ stern truth, she moves in a cold, hard world best left untrodden. 
/ In a word, confusion .of categories, crude. induction, uncritical. 


eee - 


THE EARLY PHASES OF THOUGHT 387 


(exon ng, and childish make-believe go to determine the char- 
‘acter_of. the. general ideas formed in the lower Stages of human — 
\thought, and these conditions account for animism and magic. 


' 5. The Supernormal and Mysterious. 
- For us the distinction of the natural and supernatural is 
‘familiar from boyhood. ‘There is an ordinary course of things 
constituting the normal life of man and the regular process of 
‘the world. Above and beyond it is God in his heaven, perhaps 
‘sustaining it all, certainly capable of intervening and altering 
“it as he chooses. Philosophy and science struggle back from 
'this dualism towards the idea of a single order, but for early 
‘thought the clear division of two orders had not arisen. There 
’ was no supernatural properly so called, because there was as 
yet no established order of nature. In the notion of the spirit 
+as such there was nothing supernatural. It was rather the 
‘simplest way of formulating the facts of life and death, sleep 
‘and dreams, disease and recovery. Nor were the “ occult ”’ con- 
‘nections of magic anything out of the way. On the contrary, 
‘they formed themselves spontaneously on the line of least 
“mental resistance. To make rain by squirting water was not 
‘necessarily to call supernatural powers into play, so as to con- 
‘nect things that were very remote, for the things did not seem 
‘remote but almost the same. Nevertheless, for primitive as for 
-all men, there is a deep distinction between the known and the 
“unknown, and of the unknown there is that which impresses 
primitive man as abnormal, strange and awesome, gets itself a 
‘name, and figures in the account of any natural event that is 
striking or terrifying, any power, personal or impersonal, that is 
‘extraordinary, any art that is secret. This power may attach 
‘to the skilled magician, and explain why his arts succeed while 
‘others who may use the same materta magica fail. Thus, the 
Melanesian wizard has mana, by which he affects things at a 
distance. The chief’s supremacy in the same region is due to 
his mana. He may be elected because he has mana attributed 
to him, and he succeeds to his office because mana is conferred 
on him by the imposition of hands. Mana once acquired is a 
“very useful possession. Its owner may pass it on to another. 
‘He may throw it into a material object, which becomes then a 
‘source of danger. He may use it, and does habitually use it, 
‘to secure his property. By this simple means, for example, he 
solves the problem of closing a public right of way and annexing 
‘it himself. If the taboo is broken the evil consequences are 
averted by a present to the man who put it on—the human 








388 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


spirit, after all, controlling the magic influences. Spirits, too, 
may have mana. Indeed a regular source from which it is derived 
is a ghost or other spirit,’ and the spirit with mana is super- 
normal in power and mysterious and fearsome in action. ‘Thus 
the spirit that has mana is the object of something like a religious 
emotion, which does not pertain to spirit as such, and the man 
who can put mana into familiar processes and make them preter- 
natural successfully is a wizard. Now conceptions analogous to 
mana are widespread. Thus among the Sioux peoples every- 
thing mysterious or powerful is Wakan.? The Omaha call the 
Christian God Wakanda,’ the sun was worshipped as Wakanda, 
the Thunder-being invoked as Wakanda. ‘The sacred pole was 
‘like Wakanda,’?* Wakanda hated the murderer, and even 
those who ate with him,°® and the issue of blood pertained to 
Wakanda.® So, again, among the Iowa, the Sun and Wind and 
Thunder-being are Wakantas,’ and among the Dakota and 
Assiniboin all life and everything that has power is Wakan.® 
The corresponding terms among the Algonquin were Oki and 
Manitou, and among the Iroquois Oki and Orenda.? In Negro 
Africa we find among the Abatua an impersonal evil influence, 
Likundu.!® A man has Likundu as elsewhere he may have the 
evil eye. Among the Bambala, if a man is fortunate in his 
enterprises, if many of his enemies die or are ruined without 
apparent natural cause, he has a powerful Likundu, a quality 
of which no material trace can be found at hisdeath." To the 
Pygmy a mysterious death, a strange sound by night, and even 
an accidental injury, are all ““oudah.’1!* Terms such as these 
range in meaning from the profoundest mysteries of life and 
death to the trivialities of personal luck or ill fortune. They 
give a name and a local habitation in the world to the unintelli- 
gible, the unpredictable, and more particularly to the dreadful 


1 Codrington, p. 118. Conversely, in the Solomon Islands, only those 
who possess mana become worshipped as ghosts (p. 125). 
Dorsey, A Study of Srouan Cults (R. B. E., xi. 366). 
ib. 'Theapplication seems to have been made first by the missionaries. 
1b., pp. 376, 382, 412. 
Dorsey, Omaha Sociology, R. B. H., iii. 369. 
Omaha Sociology, p. 267, quoted in Marett’s Threshold of Religion, p. 29, 
ab., p. 423, 424. 8 4b., p. 432. 
Brinton, Mystery of the New World, p. 45; Hewitt, Amer. Anth., 1902 
p. 37; Marett, p. 130. 
x Monographies Ethnographiques, ed. J. Halkin, i. 101. | 
11 The imputation may be dangerous (Van Overbergh, Mono. Ethnoor.,. at 
. 262). The author thinks the power may be represented by certain 
kinds of pebbles. If so, it resembles the Likundu of the Mangbetu, whieh 
is strictly a pebble “ dans la vessie ”’ (7b., iv. 366). 
12 Marett, Threshold of Religion, p. 100. 


onto Ff WS bw 


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THE EARLY PHASES OF THOUGHT 389 


and mysterious... The mystery may be magically conceived— 
mana, for instance, is Very like one of the half-material qualities 
‘Of magic—or it” may be merely named and felt without. being 
further defined; But in any case here is an expression. for 
the emotions of awe and wonder that in all ‘stages contribute to 
4 emake-up of the feligious consciousness. The recognition of 
“mystery is not religion, but it is contributory to religion. 





6. Myths, Culture Heroes, and Creators. 
_ Story-telling is an art which primitive man enjoys as much 
as his civilized fellows, and has had its share in peopling the 
world with spirits and heroes. We cannot expect to trace the 
origin of every myth in detail, for we cannot set bounds to human 
fancy. We can only see in ‘general how the tales of a people 
reflect the general character of their ideas, and how, accordingly, 
‘primitive myths are full of magic and animism and mana, and 
all the elements of primitive thinking. In particular, we can see 
‘that an early method of explaining facts of nature or customs 
of man is that of telling a story about them and how they were 
‘set going in the past, by some personage of the by-gone times. 
‘This myth-making is in full vigour among the rude tribes of 
Central Australia. Why has the Echidna spines upon its body ? 
Because in the Alcheringa there lived an Echidna man who for 
an outrage on sacred ground was pierced with spears. This was 
the destruction of the man himself and of his totem kindred, 
‘who have never since been re-incarnated in man but only in 
Echidnas with spears sticking out of them.? It is characteristic 
of these tales that what happens once happens always. The 
feature which an animal acquires it hands on for ever to its 
whole species. In fact, the “principle” of tale-telling as the 
explanation of natural processes seems to be once again that 
slippery identification of one and all which we found under- 
lying imitative magic and totemism. Ifso, the primitive myth, 
so far as it serves a purpose in primitive religion, still rests on 
confusions analogous to those already examined. It also im- 
plies that capacity for freely imaging persons, situations and 
actions on the analogy of experience which all races and all 
levels of culture share alike. By virtue of his myth-making, 
the savage can people the world, not merely with spirits and 
powers, but with persons, heroes or monsters with a definite 
character and a history, with wives and children, loves and hates, 


| 1 Marett, op. ctt.; cp. his first essay entitled ‘‘ Pre-animistic Religion.” 
* Spencer and Gillen, I. 398. 


390 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


wars and schemes of policy, all in a world of their own upon the 
mountains, beneath the earth, or in the sky. 

Where the mythical being comes into relation with the origin 
and life of nature or with the customs and destinies of man-he 
may be said to belong to religion, and in quite the lowest levels 
we find, in fact, creation myths connecting the origin of the 
world with mythical beings of the ‘‘ Great Long-Ago.” For 
example, the Central Australians held that in the Alcheringa 
two beings arose out of nothing in the western sky and carved 
men out of imperfectly shaped creatures, between animals and 
men.t According to the Kaitish tribe a spirit-being named 
Atnatu arose in the sky before the Alcheringa. He made him- 
self and has another sky and sun which are not ours. The 
stars are his lubras. He had sons and daughters in the sky, 
but they gave him no Churinga, so he threw them down to 
earth. He is angry if the bull-roarer is not sounded at the 
initiation ceremonies, and once dragged a number of boys up 
into the sky and ate one—but the flesh was not good.’ 

Culture and creation myths are common throughout Cali- 
fornia. In the North we have culture heroes. In the Centre 
(which includes some of the lowest tribes) we have myths of 
the creation of the world and mankind, and it is said that a 
“lofty conception”’ of the Creator is sometimes found, though 
marred by the figure of the tricksy Coyote, who half assists and 
half thwarts him. Among the Columbian peoples we find 
‘‘ transformers,’ who are responsible for the existing order of 
things, e.g. among the Nootka, two beings descended from 
heaven and transformed semi-human beings into men.* Among 
the Bella Coola, four deities help the raven to liberate the sun. 
One of them made man, gave him the arts, and still adds to his 
favours.® All the Coast Salish believe that the Great Trans- 
former will some day descend from heaven again and punish 
the bad. In South America, the Paressi hold that the first 


1 Spencer and Gillen, p. 388. 2 2b., li. 498. 

3 Kroeber, ‘ Religion of the Indians of California”? (Univ. of Calif. 
Pub. Tr.), p. 343. In the northern half the creator is anthropomorphic, 
or if not is imaged in the Coyote. In the southern half the creators are 
animals with the eagle as chief. In southern California there are no crea- 
tion-myths, but tales of early wanderings and the founding of institutions. 
Professor Kroeber’s account does not altogether agree with that of Powers, 
who writes that, except for a few tribes in the North, ‘“ I am thoroughly 
convinced that the Californian Indians had no conception whatever of a 
supreme being.’’ Their real belief was in the Coyote, while the Great 
Man or Old Man above was a mere modern graft acquired from the whites 
(Tribes of California, p. 413). 

* Boas, B. A., 1890, p. 595. 

§ ¢b., 1891, p. 420. 6 +b., 1890, pp. 579, 580. 


| THE EARLY PHASES OF THOUGHT 391 
woman lived a kind of chaos. Living things sprang from 
her, and.then man, and _ finally—last word of creation—the 
 Paregsi-t 
| ~# These creation myths, running down as they do to the lower 
‘Strata of culture, raise at once the question whether the creators 
‘should not be regarded as supreme gods, and whether such a 
belief is an integral part of savage religions. Now the existence 
of Great and Good Spirits is certainly reported among many 
wimitive peoples, but three questions have to be settled before 
fre can determine their place in primitive religion: viz. (1) how 
‘far are these reports trustworthy, (2) how far, when the Good 
‘Spirit really exists, is it an importation from Christianity or some 
other civilized religion, (3) how far is the Good Spirit, when 
recognized, an object of worship, and therefore an integral part 
f religion ? 
The savage races among whom Great Spirits are principally 
found or supposed to be found are the Red Indians and the 
Australians. Especial stress has been laid by some writers on 
the case of the Australians on account of their extremely low 
grade of development. But recent research seems to have estab- 
lished definitely that at least among a large proportion of the 
tribes there is nothing comparable to the worship of a divine 
creator and sustainer of all things. With regard to the natives 
of Central and Northern Australia, Messrs. Spencer and Gillen 
have now shown that while the Alcheringa ancestors had super- 
human powers, there is no instance of any being regarded as a 
deity. There is no idea of appealing to them for protection nor 
of propitiating them, except in the case of a mythic creature 
called Wollunqua among the Warramunga tribe, who is distinctly 
regarded, not as human, but as a snake. Further, the natives 
from Lake Eyre to the far north and east to the Gulf of Car- 
pentaria “have no idea whatever of the existence of any supreme 
being who is pleased if they follow a certain line of what we 
call moral conduct, and displeased if they do not do so.’’? 
Among the tribes of South-Eastern Australia religious ideas as 
well as social customs are somewhat more advanced. But here 
again, what has sometimes been taken for a supreme god appears, 
when the evidence is put together, rather as a “ venerable, 
kindly headman of a tribe, full of knowledge and tribal wisdom, 
and all-powerful in magic, of which he is the source, with virtues, 


1 Von der Steinen, Unter den Natur-Volkern Central-Brazilens, p. 437. 
Creation myths are found in people so primitive as the Semang and Sakai, 
but the theistic element is thought to be borrowed (Martin, p. 935). 

2 Spencer and Gillen, II. p. 491. 


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392 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


Popa and passions such as the aborigines #@gard them.” } 
O 


nce a chief on earth, he or his spirit has now ascended with 
his people to the sky and rules them there, retaining some 
measure of interest in the doings of the tribe on earth. He is, 
in fact, a spirit like the other spirits of men, but greater and 
more powerful.? 
~ The other chief group of primitive people who have been 
held to believe in a divine creator are the North American 
‘Indians. But in this case also investigation has rendered it 
probable that the Great Spirit is either (1) a misunderstanding, 
or (2) borrowed from the whites, or (3) an anthropomorphic 
nature-god. The Algonquin term for spirit, manitu, had a 
general application, and was partly misunderstood by mission- 
aries and partly used by them as a stepping-stone to the idea 
of God.® 

The Sioux Wakan and the Iroquois Orenda have given rise 
to misapprehensions. None of them, as we have seen above, 
were personal terms. A god might be Wakanda, but Wakanda 
was not a god.* Creation myths, however, are frequent. The 


Sioux story of the creation of man may be taken as a 
sample— 


‘ Before the creation of man, the Great Spirit ”’ (whose bird- 
like tracks are yet to be seen) “‘ used to slay the buffaloes and 
eat them on the ledge of the Red Rocks. . . One day when a large 
snake had crawled into the nest of the bird to eat his eggs, one 
of the eggs hatched out in a clap of thunder, and the Great Spirit 
catching hold of a piece of the pipe-stone to throw at the snake 
moulded it intoa man. This man’s feet grew fast in the ground, 
where he stood for many ages like a great tree, and therefore he 
grew very old: he was older than a hundred men at the present 
day; and at last another tree grew up by the side of him, when 
a large snake ate them off both at the roots, and they wandered 


off together; from these have sprung all the people that now 
inhabit the earth.” ® 


1 Howitt, Native Tribes of South-Hastern Australia, p. 500. 

2 Mr. Howitt does not regard such a cult as equivalent to ancestor 
worship. The term “father ’’ used in addressing such beings expresses 
properly a tribal, not an individual relation, and towards old men is used 
as a term of respect (7b., p. 507). 

3 Tylor, J. A. J., xxi. 284-288. Good and bad spirits are often found 
among the South American Indians also, but accompanied with stories of 
the deluge, the creation of Eve, ete., which betray their origin. 

* See especially Dorsey, Siouan Cults, p. 365, ete. Two Omahas indeed 


said that their ancestors worshipped a supreme Wakanda, but did not 
know how or where. Ci. Brinton, Myths, p. 48. 
5 Catlin, North American Indians, ii. 168. 


THE EARLY PHASES OF THOUGHT 393 


Here the Gréat Spirit is conceived in bird form and the whole 
story is in the crudest style of myth-making. In other cases 
the Great Spirit is merely the sun or spirit of the sun—as the 
following hymn shows— 


“ At the place of light, 
At the end of the sky, 
I (the Great Spirit), 
Come and hang. ge Sign. 


I am the ing body of the Ghedt Spirit above, 
(The Great Spirit, the Everlasting Spirit above). 


Tillumine earth, 
T illumine heaven.”’ 1 


Many of the expressions in the hymn, taken singly, would 
appear to describe a supreme spiritual being comparable to the 
God of civilized religion, but; as the context shows, they are, in 
fact, applied to the sun. So easy is it for one form of religion 
to use for its purpose the terms and expressions familiar to 
another of quite different rank. Mere indistinctness simulates 
unity in a misleading way. The Indian spirits are so little indi- 
vidualized that they all seemed one to the inquirer. The marked 
individualities of Polytheism were not yet attained—still less 
were they overcome and merged in the unity of a single divine 


ature.? 
] Lastly, where great and good spirits are recognized in savage 
religion we constantly find that they are in practice neglected 
for the active, present, and possibly dangerous spirits of the 
immediate surroundings of man. The evidence on this point 
comes from all parts of the world. The good spirits, the Algon- 
quin held, could only do good. It was the bad ones that needed 


1 Schoolcraft, i. 398. 

2 Cf. De la Saussaye, Manual of Religion, vol. i. p. 273. A race may 
recognize one god because it has not imagination enough to differentiate 
distinct objects and functions, or because it has attained a measure of 
insight into the unity which runs through all differences and joins divers 
parts into one framework. The results would agree on one point, but they 
would belong to wholly different mental grades. Some such misconception 
perhaps influences Australian travellers, the vague statement of the natives 
that some mystical being made “ everything ”’ being taken with the fulness 
of connotation which the word possesses for the civilized mind. The 
Australian means rather, ‘all the things you see about you ’’—things 
generally, without any precise limit. His “everything ”’ is a mere vague 
generality, and the creator of it far below the distinctly individualized 
deity of Polytheism with a definite province marked out for him (see 
Spencer and Gillen, vol. ii. p. 492). 


394 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


propitiation.1 The Dakotahs knew little about what the Great 
Spirit would do. All the fear they had was of the spirits of the 
departed.2, The Caribs recognized a higher spirit, but paid him 
no -honours.? Of a supreme spiritual creator, distinct from a 
natural object such as the sun, who is also the central object 


1 Schoolcraft-Drake, i. 152. 2 Schoolcraft, ii. 195. 

5 Waitz, vol. iii. p. 385; De la Saussaye, vol. i. p. 262 (Negroes). 
Among the Ojibways there was said to have been a Great Spirit, but he 
was indifferent, while there was a bad spirit and innumerable subject spirits, 
and especial awe of the thunder. Among the Haida, Harrison (J. A. J., 
xxl. 15-17) finds a good and bad spirit of Light and Darkness, but the 
minor deities are more important. Among the Western Déné in general 
there was no supreme being (Hill-Tout, Brit. N. America, p. 166); apart 
from some vague idea of a being in the sky who caused rain and whom 
they did not worship, but had to appease (Morice, Proc. Can. Inst., vii. 157). 
Shamanism and totemism were the working beliefs (Hill-Tout, 177, 178). 
The Blackfeet recognized the “‘ Old Man ”’ as chief god, but did penances 
to please the sun (Grinnell, p. 258). Among the Nootka the chief may 
pray to the deity, ordinarily they address themselves to the sun and moon 
(Boas, B. A., 1890, p. 595). The Tsimshian may pray to heaven, but 
ordinarily address a Neqnoq, which means anything mysterious from the 
will of heaven to the whistle used in the dances (Boas, B. A., 1899, p. 846). 
The Eastern Déné dimly recognize the Great Spirit, but he has no influ- 
ence on conduct, while numerous minor spirits are propitiated (Ross, Sm. 
Rep., 1866, p. 306). The Californians recognize an Old Man above, but 
the coyote is the most useful and practical deity (Powers, op. cit., p. 413). 
The Good Spirit of the Tehuelches is careless, and perhaps of Christian 
origin. The evil spirits are propitiated or warded off by shamans (Musters, 
At Home with the Patagonians, pp. 179, 180). The Araucanians are said 
by D’Orbigny (Voyage, i. 37) to recognize a creator without worship- 
ping him, but according to Latcham (J. A. I., xxxix. 346) the Thunder- 
God is their chief deity. The Puelches (D’Orbigny, ii. 270) think the 
Good Spirit needs no prayers, but an evil one who sends disease and death 
can be evoked by shamans. The Chiriguanos have a good as well as a 
bad spirit, but no cult (Thouar, Hxplorations, pp. 47, 209). The Uaupes 
have no definite idea of God, but propitiate a devil (Wallace, Amazon, 
p. 482 seq.). In British Guiana the supposed supreme gods are rather 
the tribal ancestors. Good spirits are disregarded, and the object of 
ceremonies is to avert the attention of evil ones (im Thurm, British 
Guiana, pp. 366-368). The Aucas are said to recognize a good creator, who 
is bound to givé them all they want. The medicine women are creations 
of an evil spirit (D’Orbigny, IT. 289). Among the Indian hill tribes the 
Angami Nagas have a vague belief in a supreme being, but look on him 
as too great and good to injure them (Godden, J. A. JI., xxvii. p. 30). 
The Kukis, according to Dalton, recognize a supreme God who is man’s 
judge, but he mentions sacrifices to the evil spirit that causes diseases 
(Ethn. of Bengal, p. 45). The Kasias have a name for the supreme being, 
but their cult is concerned with spirits (ib., p. 57). To the Munda Kol 
(Sellinghaus, Z. H., iii. 326 seq.) attributes “‘ childish monotheism and a 
developed belief in witchcraft and bad spirits.’’ The Oraons have a supreme 
god who is not worshipped (Dalton, 247 seq.). Among the Sakai, Semang 
and Jakun, the working cult is shamanism, some greater spirits being 
vaguely known (Skeat, J. A. J., xxxii. 138). The Thado clans believe 
in a creator who takes little interest in them, the cult of lake, wood and 
rivey spirits being the more important (J. Shakespear, J. A. J., xxxix. 375). 
Thé Singphos admit a chief spirit who existed before the earth, but 


THE EARLY PHASES OF THOUGHT 395 


of worship, I have found no recorded case in the uncivilized 
world. 





animism, shamanism, and ancestor worship constitute the body of their 
cults (Wehrli, J. A. H., xvi. 49). 

In Africa, the idea of a supreme spirit of the sky, wielding the thunder 
and giving rain, prevails all over Congoland, and is vaguely held even by 
the Pygmies (Johnston, G. Grenfell and the Congo, pp. 632 seq.). This 
deity is more or less anthropomorphic and more a creator than an ancestor, 
however indifferent now to humanity. Certainly in the belief of many 
Congolese he is too far off to care for man, whom he created but left to 
the control of minor spirits (p. 636). The attributes ascribed to him by 
the Baila are interesting: ‘The one who throws down for himself the 
imbula first. The one who institutes customs, who gives gifts and rots 
them; who rots the masako; the creator, the sender of so much water 
that there is no place left dry, the giver of thunder and much rain, the one 
who does what no other can do; that all things are his and he can do as 
he wishes.”’ The Mayombe recognize the existence and power of Zambi, 
but do not invoke him because he represents fatality (Overbergh, 
Monogr., ii. 291); possibly Zambi is Wakanda again, cf. p. 388). Among 
the Basonge there is an anthropomorphic god, who is all powerful, but 
as he lives in the earth it is useless to implore him (ib., Monogr., iii. 392). 
The Mangbetu have a vague belief in a supreme being, but no name for 
him except Kiluma, which = everything they do not understand. The 
thunder, however, is Kiluma speaking in anger, which suggests partial 
personification (ib., Mongr., iv. 375). Among the Melanesians, Quat 
did not create the world, but formed its present conditions (somewhat 
as the Columbian transformers). He is rather a hero of tales than a lord 
of spirits, playful and full of magic power (Codrington, pp. 152, 157, 
158). 


Traces of a cult in connection with a high god appear, however, in 
certain instances. In Australia, among the Euahlayi, Mrs. Parker states 
that prayers for souls might be addressed to Baiame, and that orphans 
could pray to him for rain (p. 8). In N.-W. Central Queensland, magi- 
cians obtain power from Mulkari, a beneficent being who is the cause of 
whatever is unaccountable (and thus looks a little like Wakanda) (W. E. 
Roth, p. 153). The Herbert River Kohin is a warrior, and we might 
regard him as a demon, but the natives look on him as a father and he 
punishes breaches of custom (Howitt, pp. 498, 499). Summing up on 
the ‘‘ tribal all-father,”’ who, under the name of Daramulun, Baiame, etc., 
extends over the S.-E. of Australia, Howitt writes: ‘“‘ There is no worship 
of Daramulun, but the dances round the figure of clay and the invocating 
of his name by the medicine men certainly might have led up to it ”’ (p. 507). 
On the Pacific slope, the Kootenay are said by Chamberlain (B. A., 1802) 
to worship the sun or heaven, while the Coast Salish worship the sun 
and the Great Wanderer, the Kwakiutl the sun, the Thlinkeet the sun, 
mountains, thunder, the killer and the seal (Boas, B. A., 1891). None 
of these seem to be supreme beings, though Chamberlain finds the idea of 
an over-ruling spirit in the sun-worship of the Kootenay. The Thompson 
Indians believe in transformers, especially the Old Coyote, but it is not 
clear whether they are addressed in prayer (Teit, Jesup Hxpedition, 
1900, p. 337). 

Among the Indian hill peoples the Garo recognize and have a priest- 
hood of a supreme god (Dalton, p. 59). The Katodis, a nomadic tribe 
or caste, are said to pray to a supreme being for bodily needs. He sends 
rain, but as they do not know whether he creates life, his position cannot 
be very well defined (J. Wilson, J. R. A. S., vii. 26). The Punans (a 
very primitive people) pray to Bati Penialong, who is the chief god of the 


396 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


On a review of the evidence (the heads of which are given in 
note 3, p. 394, and which it must be confessed, is often vague, 
baffling, and even contradictory) the most reasonable con- 
‘clusions are as follows: (1) The conception of a creator has 
' arisen apart from civilized influences among some peoples even 
of very low culture. (2) High gods, as a supreme sun or sky 
god, or a culture hero such as Baiame, are more common, and 
are also found in low grades. (3) A supreme god is very rarely 
the object of a cult, but “‘ high gods ” are frequently the origin- 
ators of custom and concerned in its maintenance, are sometimes 
gods of the dead, and are occasionally addressed in prayer. To 
this extent we must qualify the generalization that magic, and 
some form of animism, animatism, or the cult of the dead form 
the-working creed of the simpler peoples. 

/8. We have now before us in outline the principal elements 
in primitive thought—what may be called the materia magica 
and the materia divina, the separable quasi-material spirit, the 
undifferentiated “‘life ’’ of persons, animals and things, the sur- 





cally,” but with less distinct human qualities than among the settled 
peoples. Among the Kenyahs, Hose and McDougall think that Bati 
Penialong was originally a war god and has come to be a chief among 
gods (Pagan Tribes of Borneo, ii. 13, 186 seq.). In E. Africa the Nandi 
pray and sacrifice to the sun, whom they hold to be the creator of 
man and beast (Hollis, p. 40). 

Here and there the dead are associated with a spirit who may perhaps 
be thought of as a high god. Among the Mycoolon of Queensland, the 
dead climb eventually to the sky, where they are looked after by a spirit 
(E. Palmer, J. A. J., xiii. 291). Among the Gournditch Mara, according 
to Staéhle, in the place to which a good departed might go there was a 
man who took care of the world (Kamilaroi and Kurnai, Appendix F). 
Among the Larrakeah, Foelsche describes a very good man living in the 
sky, who made all things excepting the black fellows, while another good 
man lives in the earth and made the first black, and is said to judge 
them. On the Namoi and Barwin Rivers, one account is that the good or, 
perhaps, all the dead go to Baiame, others say that they become birds 
(Ridley, J. A. J., ii. 269). Among the Yuin, the soul, or shadow, goes to 
Daramulun (Howitt, p. 495). The Ngarigo thought that the dead were 
taken care of by Daramulun (Howitt, p. 437). In the Maryborough 
tribes a being called Birral directs the good among the dead, including 


good hunters and warriors, to the island where they are to dwell, but — 


little seems to be known of this spirit (Howitt, p. 498). In N. America 
the Pawnees were created by Ti-ra-wa and will live with him after death 
(Grinnell, Pawnee Stories, 354). In Brazil, among the Jumanas, there is 
a good spirit who eats with the soul after death and takes it to himself 
(von Martius, p. 485). In New Guinea, among the Northern Massim, 
the dead go to an underground, place presided over by Topilita, a man 
with huge flapping ears, who first sent men with their totem animals into 
the upper world. He lives like an ordinary chief, but has magic powers 
and can cause earthquakes (Seligmann, Melanesians of New Guinea, 733), 


ee 


THE EARLY PHASES OF THOUGHT 397 
influences by which the changes of the world and the chances 
of life are affected, the Mysterious that surrounds man and with 
which any notable fact or object may be invested, and finally, 
the imagery with which the play of fancy may populate the 
world. None of these things are by themselves a religion, or 
a@ magic, or a philosophy. They are the elements or material 
out of which early man forms a religious cult or a magic art. 
How does he do this? To answer this question we must first 
define religion and magic. 

We may remark first, that, however distinct in idea, animism 
and magic find, especially in primitive times, many points of 
contact. Totemism is one instance, for, as has been pointed 
out, the bond of union which makes the totem one with its 
human worshippers, or rather fellows and allies, is of magical 
character, while the totem itself is often a spirit or perhaps even 
a god. Again,.the magic power may come from and be con- 
trolled by aman. ‘Thus the whole object of Melanesian cults is 
to obtain and_use mana. A dangerous magical influence, again, 
may emanate directly from a deity. Thus, when Uzzah touches 
the Ark he is immediately struck dead, not because he did 
anything wrong, for his intention was absolutely innocent, but 
because Yahveh “ broke forth’ upon him. The Ark, being the 
habitation of Yahveh, was intrinsically dangerous, just like a 
highly electrified body. Animism creates spirits of the dead, 
but the operation of these spirits and of death in general is 
conceived in terms of magic. The mourner who may be haunted 
by the dead is infected by their danger and has to seclude himself, 
and this, rather than the desire of supplying the deceased with 
comforts, is on some occasions probably the true explanation of 
the destruction of the dead man’s property and of the mourning 
imposed upon his widow. Again, a magic influence may become 
a spirit. The curse which the evil-doer brings upon himself may 
be conceived magically, or it may pass into a spirit which haunts 
the man; or finally, by a union of both ideas, it may be an evil 

ich the spirit inflicts upon the man.? 

But this only shows that the material of magic and animism 
can be combined or interwoven. What is magic in itself, and 
what is religion? Magic is not the belief_in occult influences, 
homeopathic actions and so forth, it is}jan art whereby men 


| 


seek to attain ends by the use of occult influences.| When these 


1 This magical conception seems at least to underlie the anthropo- 
morphic account in 2 Sam. vi. 7 seq. 4 
2 See some remarks by the present writer in Soczological Papers, vol. ii. 


E72 


398 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


influences are thought of as mysterious or act in a supernormal 
way, it is itself an occult art, the peculiar property of a magician, 
or a god, or a ghost. Thus, the magical art that the common 
man may use rests on connections which present no difficulty 
to the savage mind though much to a mind infected by common- 
sense distinctions. The magic of magicians or spirits rests on 
similar influences raised to a higher power by mana or wakanda.} 
Magic as such has nothing to do with religion except (1) that it 
moves in a supersensible world; (2) that it is an effort to get on 
terms with the world, and as such provides an outlet for emotion 
and a confidence in success which are of real psychological 
\efficiency. Generally, magic is the control.of.occult_forces-for 
human ends, the occult being, as defined above, that which_is 
neither apparent to the senses nor legitimately inferred : from the 
sensible. These forces may include spirits, ghosts, demons, even 
deities, but the test of magic always is that the spirit is subservient, 
‘not the magician. Moreover, the means which render the spirit 
subservient are themselves non-spiritual—spells, incantations, 
the use of sacred names, homeeopathy or infection. We should 
not, therefore, be wrong if we supplemented the definition by 
introducing the contrast with the spiritual, and described magic 
as the use of non-spiritual occult forces for human ends, under- 
standing that one of the applications of these forces might be 
to control spiritual beings. We may add that as resting on the 
occult in the sense defined, as wrapping itself in mystery rather 
than seeking its explication, magic is not akin but opposed to 
science.” 

Religion is also an effort. on the part..of.man_to.get-en-terms 
with the world, but its path les through the conception of man 
as a spiritual being, member of a spiritual order, “Which “gives” 
meaning to his life, direction..to_his conduct,” forti 
consolation in the life-tragedy. Generally, religion i is the service 
of the spiritual order, and its development consists in the pro- 
gressive apprehension of the spiritual, an apprehension which is 
never merely intellectual, but which is permanently based on 
an emotional and practical response. In its essence the spiritual 
is the impulse to harmony which, as contrasted with inanimate 


1 JT follow Dr. Jevons, therefore, in holding that magic essentially 
implies a magician (Soctological Review, 1908, p. 112. Cf. Wundt, 
Volkerpsychologie, Book IV. pp. 262-285). 

* When a Melanesian tests the reputed mana of a stone by examining 
whether it makes the plants grow (Codrington, p. 119), he is, so far, intro- 
ducing the common-sense touchstone of experience which is the rudiment 
of science, but in the same degree he is rising above the magical plane of 
thought. 


THE EARLY PHASES OF THOUGHT 399 


tnatter makes for life, as contrasted with the inertia of the vital 
mechanism impels to fuller realization and the development of 
higher faculties, as contrasted with the dumb-driven impulse 
inspires the articulate creative purpose, as contrasted with the in- 
different self-centred individual reveals comprehensive unity of 
aim and regenerates the life of the part with the consciousness of 
the whole. The conception grows by antithesis to the mechanical. 
But in its first phases this antithesis is not formed. Inanimate 
things, animals, and human beings are not clearly differentiated, 
and while the spirit begins to be thought of as that which gives 
life, it is conceived as that half-material entity which has been 
called the double. It is a step in advance when the spiritual 
being is endowed with a distinct and concrete personality, for 
personality is a feature of the life of spirit. It is a higher stage 
again when God is defined as a spirit pure and simple, when God, 
in fact, becomes the incarnation of all that is understood of the 
spiritual order, or when, as in non-theistic forms of religion, 
the spiritual order is conceived as that which guides and gives 
meaning to the life of man. 

In this development the driving forces are in a sense the 
same throughout, except that man’s conception of the spiritual 
becomes clearer and his emotional response changes its char- 
acter accordingly. If we ask how the development begins, we 
cannot obtain a certain answer because we do not know the 
character of really primitive belief, and we can reply only by 
comparing what is actually known or probably reported of very 
simple folk, and by considering the results in the light of human 
nature and the ways of uncritical thought. We have found 
many elements contributory to religion, none of which is in itself 
a religion. For religion, resting in services, must be taken at 
this early stage to imply a cult, but the sense of mystery is not 
a cult, the belief in a double or in the spirit of a rock is not a 
cult, the fear of the dead is not a cult, a tale of creation even 
by an anthropomorphic being is not a cult. All these, however, 
are materials from which a cult may arise, and in particular 
their combination might give rise to a true religion. It is quite 
possible that in different parts of the earth they came together 
in different ways, and there may have been instances in which 
the vague Wakanda took spiritual form and so constituted a 
single high God, a spirit viewed with awe, giving rise to worship, 
before minor spirits were formed. But the evidence as a whole 
suggests a different direction for the normal line of movement, 
and brings us by a roundabout road very near to an old-fashioned 
theory. Among the lowest savages we find a fear of the dead 


400 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


expressed in the abandonment of the corpse and place of death 
and the destruction of the personal belongings. In this fear 
there is no element of religion, though it may very readily (with 
or without the aid of dream forms) engender a belief in a sur- 
viving spirit. But sometimes, as among the Veddas, we find 
this avoidance qualified by offerings of rice and milk to the 
yaka or spirits of the dead, and among the Yaka we find one 
Kande Yaka, the spirit of a great hunter who died long ago, 
who is invoked at the offerings of the dead and to whom, some 
say, spirits have to apply for leave to obtain offerings and help 
their relatives. Primarily an assistant in hunting, he becomes 
lord of the dead, and he was, our authors think, a real man 
whose cult, on account of his qualities, continued longer than 
usual If Kande Yaka were but associated with certain 
tribal customs, he would become a Baiame and a culture 
hero. 

Now the dead are feared but they are also revered and loved, 
feared as associated with the final terror, loved because death 
obliterates faults, and memory is a regret.2 As the kindlier 
feeling predominates and subdues fear to awe, emotion prompts 
the well-known acts of affection and homage, the gift of food 
and raiment, the adornment and decency of bestowal which we, 
no less than the savage, feel the necessary due. We would still 
give our tribute to the dead though we know it to be useless, 
because the giving is the natural discharge of the emotion which 
dominates us. Early man, beginning with the emotion and 
proceeding to the gift or the service, presently asks himself for 
a reason for what he is doing, and answers himself that the 
dead are there and are gratified. Here is the emotional basis 
of a belief which the uncritical judgment readily accepts, and 
the cult acquires a definite meaning and purpose. Considering 
the ubiquity of the forms of burial practice, shading from fear 
and avoidance into reverent attention and service, we may 
reasonably suppose this to be the normal form of that which 
may fairly be called religious belief and practice in early society. 
At the same time, the fear and regard for natural objects, 
prompting men to treat them as alive and so to think that they 
are alive, may develop side by side and emerge into the belief of 
spiritual beings whose good-will must be gained if man is to be 
safe. These are the two forms of true cult that we find prevalent 


1 Seligmann, The Veddas, pp. 122, 125, 127, 131, 141. 

2 These emotional suggestions are overlooked by Durkheim when he 
finds nothing “‘sacred ’’ in the double in the mere fact that it is disin- 
ecarnated (Formes élémentatres de la vie religieuse, p. 87, etc.). 


THE EARLY PHASES OF THOUGHT 401 
“among the simplest peoples.t In either case we inquirers ex- 


press the matter logically as a belief in spirits, on which certain 
i ractices are based, around which certain emotions cluster. 
‘But psychology suggests that, to picture the historical develop- 
‘ment aright, we should reverse the order—that there was first 
‘the emotion, love and awe, fear or gratitude, or the supplicatory 
‘tension of hope and anxiety; that these expressed themselves 
‘in such acts as we perform when so moved towards human 
‘beings, and that these acts, operating in the mental twilight of 
‘indistinct categories, engendered the notion of spirit as that 
‘which is human and non-human, animate yet inanimate, intelli- 
‘gent yet insensate, vitalizing body but itself body. This spirit, 
“moreover, is the culmination of the first stage of development, 
‘other forms of early belief only escaping similar contradictions 
because they lack definiteness of conception altogether. Anim- 
‘ism, on this view, is justly regarded as the first definite form of 
‘religion, animism meaning the cult of spirits without the appre- 
-hension of spirituality, and being regarded as the outcome of 
an earlier stage in which elements and forms of religion are 
active but not religion itself. Within animism it is probable 
that the cult of the dead normally occupied the first place in 
time as it retains a foremost position in importance. On the 
other hand, animism is not the beginning but the end of a stage 
‘In development, and it is not the theory of spirits which gives 


1 ‘Whether totemism should be included in this stage of religious develop- 
‘ment is a question partly of fact, partly of definition, and in both relations 
difficult to determine. Professor Durkheim, defining religion by reference 

to the sacred, does not separate it generally from magic. For whatever 
is mysterious, be it spiritual or not, may be the object of observances to 
mark it off from the common, 7. e. the profane. Now totemism rests on 
‘an identification of persons with animals or other non-human things 
which is essentially of magic character, and many of its observances seem 
to be true magic—e. g. methods of securing a supply of the totem object 
for food. To Professor Durkheim it is a religion because the object is 
sacred. For our definition it would not be a religion because the object 
is not a spirit nor the observance a cult. But Professor Durkheim would 
maintain that the totem is the symbol of the unity of a social group, and 
this is, for him, the real basis of its sanctity. This, he might say, is on 
our definition an essentially spiritual principle, and on this ground we 
should admit totemism as a religion even for us. On the other side, it 
may be urged that the feature of totemism is that the social unity is 
not spiritually but magically conceived. It is rather a body of magical 
practice containing certain ethical or even religious elements—*‘ materia 
divina ”’—than itself a religion. 

We speak, of course, of totemism in an elementary form. The totem 
animal may become an object of reverence or worship, as in some North 
American cases. But then we are at once in full blown animatism, if not 
animism in the stricter sense. The development, however, serves to show 
how the magic identification of the human and non-human may serve 

‘as one path to the belief in spirits of the inanimate world. 


DD 


402 MORALS IN EVOLUTION | 


rise to a cult, but more truly the cult, itself engendered by 
emotion, which creates the theory. 


9, Religion : makes its first step_ in advance.when_it recognizes 
gods who stand above the animate spirit. The difference be- 
éween a Spirit and a god is easier to feel than to define, but we 
may perhaps say that a god is a spirit endowed with a distinct 
personality and the object of a cult,1 as exercising certain super- 
human functions in nature or human life. Thus, the ordinary 
dead are not gods, for though they have quasi-magical powers 
they are not superhuman; rather they are dependent on men 
for food and offerings. They have no personality other than 
that which they really possessed in life, and this tends to fade 
away into the spirit shadowland ; they perform no function other 
than that of helping their relations, which any man might do. 
A distinguished ancestor, a hero raised above the ruck, on the 
contrary, is on the way to be a god. Baiame and Daramulun, 
whether heroes or incarnations of the bull-roarer, are of this class. 
They look after the dead, they instituted custom and are con- 
cerned for its maintenance, and when they are also prayed to 
they must be held to have become gods. One avenue to the 
divine, then, is through the hero cult. Another is through the 
nature spirit. Here we get the clue if we turn back in mind to 
the ambiguities which we find at a stratum of thought which 
is a little bit above the lowest, between the indwelling spirit 
and a spirit which directs or governs an object in which it dwells 
no longer. Often these are ambiguities which, from the nature 
of the case, it is not possible for the civilized investigator to re- 
solve. The spirit which dwells in an object but which can leave 
it and enter another, may clearly pass by easy transitions into 
a spirit which does not necessarily dwell in any object at all, 
but haunts it, or even, ceasing to haunt it, retains control over 
it. On the West Coast of Africa, Captain Ellis associates the 
transition with the rise of images. The Tshi, for the most part, 
recognize indwelling spirits, but when they make an image of 
the spirit, which must in the early stages be made of a fragment 
of the thing in which the spirit dwells, the tie between spirit 
and thing is weakened. In fact, it is clear that, to dwell both 
in the image and in the thing, the spirit must be in both places” 
at once. In reality he becomes most identified with his place 
of worship, and so becomes the tutelary deity of the village in 
which his shrine is placed; and this is, says Captain Ellis, the 


1 Or at least one of a class which in the same society are the object of 
cults. We should not deny the title to Olorun (see below, p. 403) because. 
he is not himself worshipped. 





THE EARLY PHASES OF THOUGHT 403 


i highest stage reached among the Tshi, where most of the gods 
' worshipped are the simply indwelling spirits of prominent natural 
‘objects in the neighbourhood. The ghost-gods, who were origin- 
ally human spirits, have a separate origin but similar history. 
The skull is brought into the temple, and so imparts a guardian 
ghost. Many such ghosts, again, become tutelary deities and 
-are often blended with nature deities. 
But the neighbouring and more advanced Yoruba-speaking 
peoples have greater gods than these. They have replaced the 
local gods to a large extent by the gods of the whole people, and 
these are the gods who personify or direct the great natural forces. 
‘They are distinctly separate from the natural objects which they, 
or some of them, represent ; and here we sometimes seem to see 
the transition going on before our eyes. Thus the great god, 
Olorun, is described as the Deified Firmament or Personal Sky. 
| He is an old god, and he is too distant and lazy to interfere in the 
world’s affairs, and for this reason he has dropped out of worship. 
‘It is to be observed that this sphere is strictly limited; he only 
‘controls the sky. ‘‘A man,” runs one of their proverbs, “cannot 
“cause rain to fall, and Olorun cannot give you a child.” Olorun 
“made Obatala, who is also the god of the sky and of the earth as 
well; but he is an anthropomorphic god; he made the first man 
and woman, he creates each new-born child; he causes deformi- 
‘ties as a punishment for neglect, and he has an oracle by which 
the guilt of accused people is decided. Similarly, a minor 
‘god, Olokun, is not the Sea regarded as a living being, but an 
-anthropomorphic deity who controls the sea.? 
The greater gods, then, are conceived as human, and as being 
distinct from that which they control and out of which the con- 
ception of themisevolved. As Sir J. Frazer points out, when the 
tree ceases to be the body of the tree-spirit, and becomes simply 
its abode, the tree becomes “‘ merely a lifeless inert mass,’ while 
the spirit tends to assume the body of a man, and ceasing “to be 
_a tree-soul, becomes a forest-god.”’? And just as spirits dwelling 
‘in trees are replaced by a god on whom the life of trees depends, 
so the spirits who dwell in water give place to a lord of the sea, 
and the divine sky to a god who directs rain and snow, thunder 
and lightning, a king who reigns over skyland. Thus, in Greek 
religion, the worship of Ouranos dies away and yields to that of 
Zeus.4 A place is, indeed, found for the discarded Ouranos in 


1 A. B. Ellis, The Yoruba-speaking Peoples, pp. 276-284. de 

2 1b., 34-70. 3 Frazer, i. 188. Numerous illustrations are subjoined. 

‘ I am assuming the truth of the common view that Zeus himself was 
originally the sky, though from Mr. Farnell’s account (Cults of the Greek 
‘States, vol. i. chap. iv.) this would seem not quite so clear. In Arcadia 


404 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


the theogonies which now become a feature of religious life. 
For the anthropomorphism of which the rudiments have already 
been noted in savage myth-making now receives a great ex- 
tension. The genealogies, the births and marriages of the gods, 
their loves and hates, their deeds of prowess, are drawn out with 
exuberant fancy. Often, as we know, the gods retain traces of 
their lowly origin; they are associated with the animals or spots 
or other natural objects from which they were originally derived. 
Hence the hawk-headed or ibis-headed gods of Egypt, hence the 
animals sacred to gods, the clean and the unclean; hence many 
a practice explained mythically, but in its origin simply a piece 
of magic or animism. But though the gods retain traces, more 
or less marked as the case may be, of their not too honourable 
descent, they become, as the religious life advances, more and 
more distinctively human, and in becoming human they also 
become superhuman. They are. endowed at least with larger 
powers, with longer life, or with immortality, and in many cases 
also with physical, mental, and moral attributes of which more 
will be said later. 

This beginning of idealism must be regarded as the final con- 
dition which the spirit must fulfilin order to become a god. The 








he was the thunder, 7. e. the thunder itself was the god (p. 45). At Olympia 
Zevs xaTtaBarns, Zeus as descending in the thunder, is worshipped (p. 46). 
But in Aschylus raraiBarns is the epithet, not of Zeus himself, but of the 
thunder (see e.g. Prometheus Vinctus), and the thunder is not Zeus, but his 
‘“‘ sleepless dart.’? Observe the three stages here. In the first Zeus is the 
thunder. In the third he is a personal god who wields it. In the second 
he is in an ambiguous condition, descending in the thunder, yet seemingly 
more than the thunder itself—the descent is one of his epithets, or, as 
Oriental thought might conceive it, one of his incarnations. The thunder 
itself is also animated in A¢schylus, “‘sleepless ’’ and “ breathing flame,” 
but we are to take this as conscious poetry, not as simple animism. What- 
ever the truth as to the original nature of Zeus, this development may stand 
as typical of the transition from animism to Polytheism. 

In Latin the use of Jupiter for the sky persists in literature of the classical 
period (sub Jove frigido). But in fact it seems very doubtful whether the 
native Roman religion ever rose above the conception of spirits presid- 
ing over places, persons, and especially functions (Wissowa, Religion 
und Kultus der Romer, especially pp. 20-28, and Saussaye, Lehrbuch der 
Religionsgeschichte, vol. ii. p. 203, ‘“‘ Die rémische Religion steckte 
noch tief in Animismus’”’). The anthropomorphic impulse came from the 
Greeks. 

1 Sir J. Frazer even says (Golden Bough, vol. ii. p. 167) that ““ we may con- 
jecture that whenever a god is described as the eater of a particular animal, 
the animal in question was originally nothing but the god himself.” In 
any case the association till recently so unintelligible of an anthropomorphic 
god with animals, plants, stones, and generally with quasi-fetich objects and 
savage rites, is now explained as referable, with very high probability, to a 
form of religious conservatism—an old rite being maintained in association 
with the worship of a new god. 





THE EARLY PHASES OF THOUGHT 405 







s of Polytheism are great gods, and often have troops of spirits 
subservience tothem. The typical relation indeed is, as Comte 
ng ago pointed out, comparable to that between a species and 
yn individual. The spirit of a tree strictly regarded is limited to 
hat tree and functions only in this spot. A tree-god controls all 
trees. Similarly all the great gods control either large provinces 
of nature—sea, earth, sky (Zeus, Poseidon, Hades), or are pro- 
tectors of the people, national gods (Yahveh, Ashur, Athene), 
or preside over one or more of the main human functions (Ares, 
Aphrodite). Thus in the conceptions underlying them there are 
_ beginnings of a higher unity, an approach to order in the religious 
basis of life, which is carried further as by the anthropdmorphiz- 
ing genealogies and hierarchies the many gods are brought into 
subjection to one father and ruler of all.1 
he gods, then, as opposed to the spirits, are clearly distinct 
rom the natural objects which they govern, or the functions 
hich they direct. They are anthropomorphic, and so tend to 
e connected by family and political relationships. They control 
he great powers of nature and the main functions of life. And 
hile human they are also superhuman, and at their best lend 
hemselves to ideal forms of beauty and of ethical thought. 










ate 


10. If Animism is the typical religion of savagery,.the cult_of 


the greater goc gods has its central point in the earlier civilizations... 
Yet to describe the religion of these civilizations would not be to 


déséiibe polytheism. We have defined ‘polytheism by marking 
it_out sharply from animism on the one side, and (by implication). 
from monotheism on the other. But inthe concrete develop- 
ment of religious history these demarcations are precisely what 
we.do.not.find. The religion of the early civilizations is a mass 
‘of conceptions in which, around the figures of the greater gods, 

_asurge of primitive animistic and magic practices rises and falls, 


1 Inasmuch as the gods have personalities which have hardened into con- 
crete individuals sharply opposed to one another, it might seem rather that 
polytheism has carried us farther away than animism from the unity of 

nature, and that where (as in the indigenous Chinese religion) we have one 
supreme spirit of the sky and one of the earth, we are nearer to unity. But 
that is misleading. Such unity as we find in animism is the unity of a blur, 
the unity which precedes differentiation. The Chinese religion—an ex- 
ceptional survival of animism in a high but very conservative civilization— 
no doubt arrives at a systematization in which something like the hierarchy 
_ of Polytheism is reproduced; but, if I understand it aright, in a much less 
articulate fashion. What, e. g. is ‘the relation between the earth spirit and 
the countless spirits of hills, groves, rivers, etc., upon the earth? To this 
polytheism would have a definite answer. They would be subjects, or 
daughters, of the earth-mother. 


=== 


lite 





a 


406 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


while here and there, through the obscurity, there dimly looms 
the outline of a higher principle. 

Thus, to confine ourselves to the two most ancient civilizations, 
we have in Babylonia and Egypt, amid much that is obscure, 
fairly typical examples of the stage of polytheism in which the 
animistic foundation is plainly visible, in which magic still plays 
an important part, in which the conception of godhead retains 
plentiful traces of its lowly origin, while, on the other hand, there 
are the beginnings evident of the stage of thought which was 
destined to supersede polytheism. These religions, in fact, have 
their centre of gravity in the polytheistic phase, while they put 
out ramifications into the phases below and above. 

‘“‘ The greater gods of the Egyptian pantheon are, as they stand 
in the historical period, impersonations of the greater forces 
that surrounded the Egyptian and controlled his life—the sky, 
the earth, the stars, the sun, the Nile.” 1 In its early phases the 
religious development seems to have proceeded independently 
but on parallel lines in the partially independent nomes or dis- 
tricts into which Egypt was divided. Each of these originally 
had its chief god, who very often personified the same natural 
attributes under a different name. In particular, “wherever 
there is some important change in the river (Nile), there they 
(these incarnations of the river) are more especially installed 
and worshipped.” 2 

The result of this multiplicity, as the different cults came into 
relation to each other, was a mythology of luxuriant confusions 
and inconsistencies, which led the Egyptian priesthood to at- 
tempt a remarkable solution. To this we shall have to refer a 
little later. But let us first notice that these greater gods are’ 
in all probability not the primary deities of the Egyptian religion, 
which has its roots rather in primitive animism. The associa- 
tion of many of the Egyptian gods with a special sacred animal 
has from the days of the Greek travellers down to the present 
generation been a puzzle of the greatest difficulty. Further 
research into the earliest Egyptian monuments coincides with 
the results drawn from comparative religion in making it prob- 
able that the animal is not the secondary figure in the cult, but, 
at least in point of time, the primary. The Egyptians had an 
animistic religion before they worshipped the greater gods Osiris 
and Ptah. The hawk-headed figure of Horus represents pic- 
torially a combination between the worship of the sun-god and 


1 Maspero, The Dawn of Civilization, 85-86. Isis of Buto denoted the 
black vegetable mould of the valley (2b., 99). | 
4 Maspero, 99. 


~ = S53 


THE EARLY PHASES OF THOUGHT 407 


the earlier worship of the hawk itself. The worship of Sekhet 
in the form of a cat-headed or lion-headed woman, again, blends 
an anthropomorphic cult with the more primitive adoration 
of the cat tribe. Like other people in the animistic stage, in 
short, the early Egyptians worshipped animals and other natural 
objects, while the later Egyptians tended to conceive of the 
deities as anthropomorphic, superhuman spirits, and the his- 
torical Egyptian religion or mythology was a compromise or 
blending of the lower and the higher. Even the greater gods 
retained many traces of their animistic origin. The Egyptian 
deities, though great spirits, are by no means necessarily eman- 
_ cipated from either the weaknesses or the wickednesses of man.! 
_ They have their wives—not only goddesses, but harems of mortal 
women, priestesses of the temples. Not only do they marry 
and are given in marriage, but they die like men and require 
burial. Like men they have a composite nature, consisting of 
soul and body. The soul might be an insect, a bird, a shadow, 
or a double—Ka—and this latter was not essentially different 
from the Ka of man. Gods, in fact, were virtually conceived as 
men in their essential nature, having bones, flesh and blood, and 
a mysterious fluid, Sa, the source of vigour, with which they 
could impregnate man.? The dead god, like the dead man, re- 
quired food and a house—his temple. Indeed, he could do with 
many temples, dividing his double among them in accordance 
with the accommodating looseness of texture which that entity 
everywhere enjoys. He might be incorporated in a statue or 
in a sacred animal.2 Some gods remained the same after 
death, as Osiris; others changed their names and perhaps their 
character. Maspero writes— 


‘“‘ Their doubles, like those of men, both dreaded and regretted 
the light. All sentiment was extinguished by the hunger from 
which they suffered, and gods who were noted for their com- 
passionate kindness when alive, because pitiless and ferocious 
tyrants in the tomb. When once men were bidden to the pre- 
sence of Sokar‘s, Khontamentit, or even of Osiris, “ mortals come 
terrifying their hearts with fear of the god, and none dareth to 
look him in the face either among gods or men; for him the great 
areasthesmall. He spareth not those who love him; he beareth 
away the child from its mother, and the old man who walketh 
on his way; full of fear, all creatures make supplication before 
him, but he turneth not his face towards them.’ Only by the 
unfailing payment of tribute, and by feeding him as though he 


+ Maspero, p. 126. 2 4b,, 108-110. 3 ib., 116-119. 


408 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


were a simple human double, could living or dead escape the 
consequences of his furious temper.”’ 


All offerings to the dead were presented to him— 


‘“‘ He was humbly prayed to transmit them to such or such a 
double, whose name and parentage were pointed out to him. 
He took possession of them, kept part for his own use, and of his 
bounty gave the remainder to its destined recipient.” 1 


In Egypt, as among other primitive peoples, “men did not 
die. They were assassinated.” The murderer might belong 
to their world and be recognized as another man, an animal, 
an inanimate object. Or he might be a spirit, a god, demon, or 
disembodied soul.2 At least in the earlier period some of the 
gods were cannibals. Sahu, 7.e. Orion, is represented on the 
pyramid of Unas in the sixth dynasty as a hunter. He hunted 
the gods, killed and devoured them, and by so doing, in ac- 
cordance with true cannibal theory, assimilated their virtues,® 
But what is even more remarkable, a man might do the same 
thing, and, by so doing, obtain control over the divinity. 
King Unas, in his address to the deities of the dead, boasts that 
the gods have been lassoed for Unas by one power, brought 
towards him by another. “‘Shosmu has cut them up for Unas 
and had the pieces cooked in broiling cauldrons. It is Unas who 
devours their magical virtues and eats their souls, and the great 
ones among them are for Unas’ feast in the morning, the middle 
ones among them, male and female, are for his roast meat, the 
small ones for hisevening meal. The old ones, male and female, 
are for his furnace.” Again, “the inhabitants of the sky are 
made his servants, and the limbs of their womenkind are thrown 
into the cauldrons. Unas has taken the hearts of the gods, has 
devoured the red crown, has eaten the white. His victuals are 
those whose magic virtues are nourished on hearts, he has eaten the 
wisdom of every god.’’* Itistousa little bizarre for a man to re- 
commend himself to the heavenly host on the ground that he has 
eaten them, but the animistic view of nature, with its spirits, that 
are at once immaterial and material, that can live by perishing, 
that may nourish man yet exist apart from him, which are more 
powerful than he and yet controllable by him, solves all these 
contradictions. Unas controls the gods because he has possessed 
himself of their virtues by eating them. Isis obtained control 
over Re in his decrepit old age by stealing his name, by the know- 


1 Maspero, 117-118. ‘ as AY Md oh 
3 Maspero, The Dawn of Civilization, 97, 98. 
4 Maspero, Recueil de Travaue, p. 59 fi. 


THE EARLY PHASES OF THOUGHT 409 


edge of which she had over him a magical control. In the same 
vay men could control the gods by magical incantations, the 
ise of wax effigies, etc.1. This is in line with the lowest ideas of 
vitchcraft. Side by side with it we find the typical conceptions 
ff anthropomorphic religion, e.g. sacrifice as a contract between 
leity and worshipper. The god himself prescribes the details, 
nd of course undertakes to fulfil his side of the bargain. He 
vbolishes human sacrifice, declaring that he will be satisfied with 
in animal. But he is still a stickler for form. Any error of 
letail would void the contract, and this is all to the good of the 
sriestly order. 

But if on its lower side the Egyptian religion is thus rooted in 
inimism and magic, if the gods figure almost as demons who 
lestroy men, and are responsible for such deaths as cannot be 
signed to obvious physical causes, if they have human con- 
subines and can be controlled by magic—on its other side the 
ssoteric philosophy of the priests tends to transcend polytheism, 
md to conceive the ultimate unity of the Divine. The very 
nultiplicity of gods—especially of gods with similar functions 
und differing only in name—was a stimulus to thought, and 
yalled for some theory to explain so bewildering a confusion. 
As the unity of Egyptian culture grew, the separate nome-gods 
were necessarily united in one pantheon. In each nome a local 
rinity or triad was found, the nome-god being associated some- 
jimes with wife and son, sometimes with two goddesses, ““ who 
were at once his sisters and his wives according to the national 
custom.” 2 Whether deliberately introduced for the purpose 
wr not, the system of triads had the effect of reconciling the 
supremacy of the old nome-gods in each locality with a recog- 
iition of gods originating in other parts. The god who was 
jupreme in one nome would enter the triad of another nome in 
. subordinate position. 


“ Hathor, supreme at Denderah, shrank into insignificance 
sefore her husband, Haroéris, at Edff. . . . On the other hand, 
Haroéris, when at Denderah . . . was nothing more than the 
ilmost useless consort of the lady Hathor.’’? 


A still more elaborate system of Enneads, or groups of nine 
rods and goddesses, arose in the Old Kingdom. The earliest 
vecorded is the Ennead of Heliopolis, the best known is that of 
Memphis, the centre of which was Ptah. Inthe Ennead, Atum 
one of the names of the sun god) is the creator of things, but 


1 Maspero, The Dawn of Civilization, 212, 214. 
2 4b., 104. 3 74b., 106. 


410 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


the members of Atum are made up of the Ennead, and the heart 
and tongue of the Ennead is Ptah. 


‘‘ When the eyes see, the ears hear, and the nose breathes they 
transmit to the heart. It is he (the heart) who brings forth every 
issue, and it is the tongue which transmits the thought of the 
heart. He fashioned all gods, even Atum and his Ennead... . 
It was he who made the kas and [created] the qualities (7. e. of 
the sun god); who made all food, all offerings by his word; who 
made that which is loved and that which is hated. It was he 
who gave life to the peaceful and death to the guilty. . . . He 
fashioned the gods, he made the cities. ... Then the gods 
entered into their bodies of every wood and every stone and 
every metal. Everything grew upon its trees whence they 
came forth.” ? 


This is neither pure Pantheism nor Monotheism, but it is the 
germ of either or both. One god is not set up to the exclusion of 
others as in Monotheism, nor is all the universe merged in a 
divine spirit asin Pantheism. Rather nine great gods are some- 
how merged in one which is the central principle among them, 
and this principle is the heart, which figures the mind or soul in 
the concrete terms of early thought. The unity is not that of 
a profound mysticism which has seen through differences to a 
deeper identity, nor yet is it the purely childish blurring of 
differences that we find in magic. It is something on the way 
from the lower to the higher stage of thought, and it would 
doubtless have proceeded further and faster in Egypt but for 
the multiplicity of local centres, each jealous for the sole deity 
of its own domain. 


‘The feudal spirit, always alert and jealous, prevented the 
higher dogma, which was dimly apprehended in the temples, 
from triumphing over local religions and extending over the 
whole land. Egypt had as many ‘sole’ deities as she had large 
cities or even important temples. She never accepted the idea 
of the sole god * beside whom there is no other.’ ”’ 2 


The monotheistic tendency nevertheless developed in latex 
periods, mainly in the form of an elevation of the sun god toa 
supreme position. ‘Thus, in the Instruction for King Mery-ke-re 
of the Middle Kingdom we read— 


‘““God made heaven and earth at their (men’s ) desire; 
They are his own images proceeding from his flesh.” 


1 Breasted, Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Eqynt, 
pp. 43-46. 
* Maspero, Dawn of Civilization, p. 152. 





THE EARLY PHASES OF THOUGHT 41] 
He “ knows every man.’”’ He may hide himself for a genera- 
tion, but his authority is always there.? 

The expansion of Egypt under the New Kingdom would make 
men think of the power of the greater gods in terms of the whole 
world rather than of Egypt alone, and so it is perhaps that a more 
definite monotheism makes its appearance.2 In a hymn of 
Amenhotep IIT.’s reign (circ. 1400 B.c.) the sun god is he— 


‘Who determines his own birth . . . 
: Illuminating the Two Lands (Egypt) with his disk, 
The primordial being who himself made himself . . . 
Sole lord taking captive all lands every day.” 


Amenhotep IV. about 1375 B.c. made an extraordinary attempt 
to establish the worship of the sun god under the name of Aton 
to the exclusion of every other. No other gods or images of 
gods or formulas swearing by gods were tolerated. Even in the 
charms for the dead Osiris might not be named.* This was 
certainly monolatry and it would seem also true monotheism, 
for Aton is addressed as creator and father of all— 


“O sole god whose powers no other possesseth, 
- Thou didst create the earth according to thy heart 
While thou wast alone .. . 
The foreign countries Syria and Kush, 
The Land of Egypt, 
O god who himself fashioned himself 
Thou art the mother and the father of all that thou hast made.” 


Amenhotep IV. was in advance of his age and his reforms 
were swept away. For people found that ‘‘if men prayed to a 
god for succour, he came not . . . if men besought a goddess 
likewise, she came not at all.”’® Yet under other names, mainly 
as Amon-Re, the supremacy of the sun god and the monotheistic 
tendency survived and, as we shall see further, takes a more 
distinctly ethical turn, as in the hymn to Amen Re— 


“Hearing the complaint of him who is oppressed, 

Kindly of heart when called upon, 

He delivereth the timid from him who is of a froward heart, 

He judgeth the cause of the weak and the oppressed. . . . 

One and only one, maker of all that are, 

From whose eyes mankind issued, 

1 Gardiner, Journal of Eqyptian Archeology, January 1914, pp. 33, 34. 
Mr. Gardiner speaks of the lines quoted as perhaps the earliest monotheistic 
passage in Egyptian literature. 

* Mr. Breasted lays great stress on this politica] factor (op. cit. pp. 47, 


315, etc.). 
2 CE, paps 1 et 4 p. 340. 5 Op. cit., pp. 326-330, ete. ® p. 345. 


412 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


By whose mouth the gods were created, 

Who makest the herbage, and makest to live the cattle, goats , 
swine and sheep, etc., etc. . . 

Sole king is he even in the midst of the gods ; 

Many are his names, none knoweth their number.” } 


This is not monotheism. It reminds us rather of the psalm 
that begins, ‘‘ God sat among the congregation of gods,” in which 
Jehovah appears as the chief figure of a Pantheon. It reminds 
us still more forcibly of the Vedic hymns in which each god in 
turn is extolled as the one and only god. 

Still later we find the pantheistic strain— 


‘““Thy form is the Nile, the first born, older than all the gods; 
thou art the great waters, thou art the sky, thou art the earth, 
thou art the nether world, thou art the water, thou art the air 
that is between them. Men rejoice because of thee, (for) thou 
ceasest not to care for all that is.” ? 


Egyptian religion rose to an esoteric doctrine which was far 
above the crude animism from which it started, and tended 
alternately towards monotheism and pantheism without reaching 
either or even deciding definitely on its true road. For it at no 
time embodied either the spiritual message of an apostle or the 
reasoned system of a thinker. Yet in its dim prevision of real 
unity underlying differences of form and tradition and its ever 
closer association of religion with ethics it reached the highest 
point short of those “discoveries ’’ in the region of spiritual 
truth which have laid the basis of the world religions. 


11. In Babylon, as in Egypt, primitive animism and the 
magic which is correlative to it, underlie throughout the wor- 
ship of the greater gods. In its progress to a higher stage the 
Babylonian religion, it would seem, worked by differentiation. 
The more important natural forces became gods, the inferior 
ones were, as a general rule, relegated to the secondary position 
of mere spirits. But at Babylon these inferior gods became 
in large measure demons, often malevolent demons,* and the 
Babylonian magic, which was so important a feature in the life 
of the people, had special reference to these demons. They could 


1 Griffith, World’s Literature, 5312, ete. 

2 From a hymn of the Persian period, late in fifth century B.c. (Breasted, 
p- 361). 

3 Jastrow, Religion of Babylon and Assyria, p. 49. 

4 As an illustration, Nun-gal was, by origin, probably a lower god of 
Sippar. He disappears as a god, and his name becomes a collective 
designation for a powerful group of demons (7b., 168). 


THE EARLY PHASES OF THOUGHT 413 


ve dealt with in one of two different ways, for the bewitched man 
aight either appeal to a sorcerer, who could control the spirit 
rectly, by potions, tying knots which would strangle him, 
jurning images, and so on, or to an exorcist, who would apply 
‘o the gods for their help against the demon, and if properly 
reated would deliver the victim out of their hand. Here is a 
lescription of the Storm Demons of Eridu— 


““ Seven are they, they are seven, 

_ In the subterranean deep they are seven, 

_ Perched (?) in the sky they are seven, 

_ In a section of the subterranean deep they were reared, 

_ They are neither male nor are they female, 

_ They are destructive whirlwinds, 

_ They have no wife nor do they beget offspring. 

Compassion and mercy they do not know, 

Prayer and supplication they do not hear, 

Horses bred on the mountains are they. 

Hostile to Ea are they, 

_ Powerful ones among the gods are they. 

_ To work mischief in the street they settle themselves in the 
highway, 

' Evil are they, they are evil, 

_ Seven are they, they are seven, seven, and again seven are 
| they.” 1 


Next hear how the demons took possession of a man and how 
ihey were driven out— 


“ They have used all kinds of charms, 
to entwine me as with ropes, etc. . . 
But I, by command of Marduk, the lord of charms, 
by Marduk, the master of bewitchment, 
both the male and female witch, 
as with ropes I will entwine, 
as in a cage I will catch, 
as with cords I will tie, 
as in a net I will overpower, 
as in a sling I will twist, 
as a fabric I will tear, 
with dirty water as from a well I will fill, 
as a wall throw them down.” 


This is declaimed by the exorciser and accompanied by 
symbolic actions.” 

Often the gods are described in terms of the crudest animism. 
When Ut-Napishtim sacrifices after the flood, ‘“‘ The gods inhaled 


1 Jastrow, 264. 2 26., 272. 


414 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


the odour, the gods inhaled the sweet odour, the gods gathered 
like flies around the sacrifice.” The finest hymns and prayers 
are associated with incantation rituals. The efficacy of prayer 
depends on its being uttered by the right person and in the right 
manner, for the ‘approved form of words is of magical efficacy.? 
The gods are of limited power. They are taken captive, and 
released by Marduk, ‘‘ who showed mercy towards the captured 
gods, removed the yoke from the gods who were hostile to him.’’ # 
They sanction the Flood and then bitterly regret, but cannot 
undo what they have done. The gods wept with Ishtar, “the 
gods in their depression sat down to weep.’ 4 Bel alone was 
ruthless. He bitterly resented the preservation of Ut-Napishtim 
—‘* What person has escaped (#)? No one was to survive the 
destruction.’ The good Ea expostulates with him. 


‘* Punish the sinner for his sins, 
Punish the evil-doer for his evil deeds. 
But be merciful so as not to root out completely, 
Be considerate not to destroy everything. 
Instead of bringing in a deluge, 
Let lions come and diminish mankind. .. . 
Let tigers, famine, pestilence, come and waste the land.” ® 


Thus adjured, Bel came to his senses, took Ut-Napishtim by 
the hand and was reconciled. . 

Thus, as is natural on anthropomorphic principle, there are 
among gods, as among men, good and bad, kindly rulers and 
headstrong tyrants. We have seen Ea interceding for mankind. 
He is the water-god, the giver of fertility; he teaches the arts 
of civilization, and his cult is favourable to human feeling. He 
tends to be the god of mankind generally, as dissociated from 
any particular spot. Marduk, again, is a magnified king, the 
protector of the weak, he releases the imprisoned, and punishes 
the evil-doer. But Shamash in the Assyrian cult is the centre 
of a higher conception than any other deity.6 While Ashur and 
Ishtar are partial to Assyria, the favours of Shamash are be- 
stowed on the kings for righteousness, and it is in the presence 
of Shamash that Tiglath-Pileser sets his captives free. The 
following hymn to Shamash will illustrate his character— 


‘“The law of mankind dost thou direct, 
Kternally just in the heavens art thou, 
Of faithful judgment towards all the world art thou.” ” 


1 Jastrow, 503. 2 7b.,'353. 3 1b., 438. 4 2b., 502. 5 26., 504. 

* With the exception, perhaps, of Sin. See the hymn to Sin quoted in 
Jastrow, p. 303. 

? Jastrow, 300. 


THE EARLY PHASES OF THOUGHT 4150 


~ Yet in this hymn; which is a prayer for the king’s life, the 
‘ater lines are a distinct echo of the incantation formule— 


, “‘ Cleanse him like a vessel . 

Illumine him like a vessel Bei 

Like the copper of a polished tablet let him be bright. 
Release him from the ban.”’ 





With this may be compared Nebuchadtenzan s hymn to 
‘Marduk on his accession— 


‘*O, Eternal ruler! Lord of the Universe! . 
* It is thou who hast created me, 
/ And thou hast entrusted to me sovereignty over mankind. 
: According to thy mercy, O Lord, which thou bestowest upon 
all, 
Cause me to love thy supreme rule. 
_ Implant the fear of thy divinity in my heart.” ! 





In such a conception of prayer there was surely the poten- 
tiality of a high development of ethical religion. Yet worship 
fails to differentiate itself wholly from magical incantation,? and 
though there are good gods who love justice, they are not fused 
into the unity of one real creator of things. In spite of some 
occasional expressions,® the better opinion appears to be that 
there was no real monotheistic tendency among the Babylonians. 


12. In the religion, or rather the religions, of the Greeks, 
again, as in the light of modern research and the comparative 
method we are coming gradually to understand the subject 
anew, we see three distinct stages of thought intertwined. At 
the base we have the demons of animism and the magical rites 
of “‘riddance.’’ We have the Keres, not awful mysterious fates 
as they already appear at times to be in Homer, but flitting 
mischievous demons bringing all manner of ills, driven away with 
sticks or purged with strong scents and holy plants like rue and 
buckthorn.4 We have the conception of a quasi-physical pollu- 
tion arising now from breach of ceremonial, now from an outrage 
on the most sacred human relations, and extending to physical 
objects > as well as to man. We have the living, self-avenging 
curse, the thin ghost squealing like a bat, and crowding to 
“drink the life-blood in the trench Ulysses made,” the animal 
god, the bogy, the monster brood. Above these fearsome shapes 


1 Jastrow, 296. 2 1b., 296 seq., 314. 

3 See, e. g. the hymn to Sin, referred to above, and cf. Jastrow, 31%. 
* Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, p. 168. 

° e.g. the pollution of the earth by blood. 


416 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


we have the more gracious, strong, beautiful, and finally ideal 
human forms of the Olympian gods—essentially mere men and 
women in the first instance, as every reader of Homer knows, but 
built on a greater scale; turbulent, laughter-loving, now tender 
and friendly, now unreasonably resentful ; joining in the fights of 
mortal men, and capable of being wounded by them, prosecuting 
the blood feud, as Poseidon against Odysseus, with no more 
regard to the inherent justice of the case than the human avenger 
would show; placated by sacrifice and trusted to perform their 
part in the implied sacrificial compact ; united, finally, in intricate 
theogonies, and so affording a crude basis for the framework of 
things and the process of creation. But the Olympian gods, 
though human in their essence, were superhuman in the types 
of their might, majesty, and beauty. They have incarnated 
for all subsequent time the ideal types of finite humanity, the 
satisfaction of a mind reposing on the work that it has done and 
knowing that it is good, not troubled as yet with the infinite 
beyond and the poverty of man’s power to cope with it. They 
are “the happy ones,” glorified children of a time—not as an 
older generation supposed when the world was young, for the 
world in Homer’s day was already old, but when for a while it 
seemed to be renewing its youth under fortunate conditions, 
beneath a sunny sky. But the Greek mind outgrew anthropo- 
morphism and the higher development took two directions. On 
the more purely religious side in connection with the Orphic 
mysteries it followed a line not unlike and greatly influenced by 
the esoteric doctrine of the Egyptian priests. The movement 
was in part an advance, in part a reversion to older methods. 
The initiated felt dimly for a higher religious conception by the 
method of mystical identifications, first between the gods in 
their various forms— 


‘One Zeus, one Hades, one Helios, one Dionysos, 
Yea in all things One God, his name why speak I asunder ? ”’ } 


Secondly between the god and the worshipper— 
‘“‘T also avow me that I am of your blessed race,” 
says the initiated, and the reply is— 
‘“‘ Happy and Blessed one; thou shalt be god instead of mortal.” 2 


Similarly in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the soul which 
passes the tests becomes itself Osiris. But as the Book of the 
Dead is essentially a provision of magical formulas, whereby 


1 Harrison, p. 656. 2 From an Orphic hymn, translated, 7b., 586. 


THE EARLY PHASES OF THOUGHT 417 


admittance to the realms of bliss is to be enforced, so it would 
seem that the Orphic ritual is at bottom a ritual of magic! It is 
the performance of ceremonial acts of occult efficacy upon which 
the soul is to rely. Here, as so often in mysticism, the spiritual 
consciousness overleaps itself and falls back intellectually on 
primitive confusions, morally on the purges and quasi-physical 
disinfectants of savage religion. It is much if purity of thought 
is insisted on as a condition and the worshipper is told that “‘ he 
who enters the incense-laden shrine must be pure, and purity is 
to be of holy heart.” 2 

A truer spirituality is to be found in the reasoned theism of 
the philosophers and the philosophic poets of Greece, whom the 
mob of educated and uneducated alike took for atheists, who 
were aware that the gods of the popular religion were beings 
made by man in his own image, that ethical purity must be 
attained by ethical and not by magic methods, and who first 
taught the world, what it has too often forgotten, that goodness 
and God are identical. These are the essential doctrines of a 
spiritual religion; they carry us outside the region of Polytheism, 
and their consideration must be deferred to a later place. For 
polytheism proper is outgrown when the stage of philosophic 
reflection is reached. Its anthropomorphic deities belong to 
the phase of thought which intervenes between the primitive 
confusion of categories and the philosophic movement which 
establishes the leading conceptions found in experience as clear- 
cut, independent objects of thought. It is the stage of the 
plastic imagination in which the mind is fully capable of forming 
for itself a concrete imagery of things unseen with all the articu- 
lateness and vividness of so many objects of perception. Its 
fictitious personalities are no longer mere pallid doubles of this 
or that function. They are many-sided beings with distinctly 
conceived attributes and a regular life history. If their origin 
is traceable to animistic confusions, if their birth is in some 
primitive personification of a function or an attribute, their 
adult life is passed on a higher plane. Their world is articulate 
in the sense that its parts are not only distinct but interconnected. 
The gods are related by ties of blood and political subordination, 
and in so far as each is responsible for some great department 
of nature or human life, the theogonies which form an integral 
part of polytheism may be said to form a first attempt, not 
perhaps at a theory of the universe, but at an imaginative picture 


1 See Harrison, pp. 587-589. 
2 ib., 479. “Oo.a, rendered as holy, means the righteousness which the 
zods ordain, and is not confined to matters of ceremonial. 
EE 


418 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


of the agencies by which its framework is maintained. The 
thought of the polytheistic stage is wider in its reach, just as it 
is more distinct in its representation, than that of animism. Its 
departmental gods represent a wider grouping of phenomena 
in proportion as a god of vegetation has a wider scope than the 
spirit of this particular plant. The endeavour to connect the 
several gods represent an attempt at a still wider interconnection 
of the parts of human experience. But all these endeavours go 
on in the form of concrete imagery and without any critical test 
of truth or any reflective examination of the conceptions used, 
The world of ideas is now a picture with many clearly drawn 
figures in which the several categories are no longer hopelessly 
interchanged and confused, but the thoughts imbedded in this 
picture are not yet separated out and held before the mind as 
objects of critical examination. It is a world whose parts ex- 
hibit some order and interconnection, wherein a wider grouping 
of the phenomena of the perceptual world is mirrored, but this 
order is built up by imagination with the aid of fanciful analogies 
and ill-understood myths, adding little to the rational insight 
into the actual scheme of things. 





CHAPTER II 


| ETHICAL CONCEPTIONS IN EARLY THOUGHT 
} 


__ I. In the world of thought dominated by Magic, by Animism, 
or by Polytheism, what account do men render to themselves of 
the basis of conduct ? What reasons do they give for the rules 
which they acknowledge, and what do they suppose to be their 
‘meaning and end? How does the violation of rule affect them, 
ieee how do they act when such violation has occurred? To 
-Ugese questions no single and simple answer can be given. 
/ No doubt, as was said at the outset, custom is binding upon 
primitive man, and binding upon him in truth because it is 
custom. But while this is the real moral force which the on- 
looker recognizes as the essential point, primitive races have 
often a definite conception of their own as to the reasons of 
their obeying custom. Not infrequently its breach will bring 
isfortune upon the wrong-doer, on some one connected with 
im, or on the community. Thus the Aleuts hold that the 
whale avoids dissolute tribes, on which account whalers must 
void women during the fishing season. But the whalers may 
ave to suffer for the sins of others as well as their own, for the 
hale would punish them if their wives were unfaithful during 
their absence, or if their sisters were unchaste before marriage. 
Similarly, the Australians hold that certain breaches of custom 
‘cause the Erkincha disease and other penalties.2 Among the 
\Hastern Eskimo, though abortion and infanticide are common, 
an opinion is growing against them on the ground that they 
bring misfortune in the village where the child’s wailing is 
eard.$ 
The process whereby breach of custom thus brings about its 







1 Reclus, p. 52; 7b., p. 67. Among the Konyaga loose behaviour is 
considered to be punished by difficult confinements. 

2 Spencer and Gillen, vol. i. pp. 168, 411, 471; cf. Howitt, Organization 
of the Australian Tribes, p. 104, and T'ribes of S.-H. Australia, p. 296. 

3 Reclus, p. 34. According to Westermarck (p. 61) unchastity on the part 
of a girl is considered by the natives of Loango to bring ruin on a country, 
and some of the Dyaks think that a pregnant unmarried woman is offensive 
to the superior powers (ib., 63). Among the Atkha Aleuts purification 
‘was required for sexual immorality (Yakof, U.S., 10th Census, vol. viii. p. 12). 


419 


420 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


own penalty is not always easy to trace. ‘The cases in which we 
have full information, however, fall into two principal classes. _ In 
the first, the-connection is “direct,” 7. e. an evil influence is set 
_up by the misdeéd Which, like any physical cause, produces 
disease or whatéver the bad result may be > these cases aren 
line with primitive’ magic. They involve what we have called-the 
materia~magica, and 80;though no magician and no magic art 
is necessarily involved, the sanction may conveniently be called 
magical. In, other instances the trespass is held to offend a 
certain spirit, or possibly to put the evil-doer or his-friends into 
the power_of the evil spirit. This coricéption belongs to the 
department..of animism, and here the sanction may be called 
religious. Finally, the*two-conceptions.can_ be blended, magical 
and religious elements being entangled together. ie 

To begin with magic influences. When the Dakota violates 
a female captive or breaks the rule of continence upon the 
war-path, he not only displeases the spirits of the deceased, 
but also the ‘‘ war-medicine,’’ and on both grounds brings down 
misfortunes on his party.1 Taboos. on intercourse have beer 
frequently mentioned as forming a large portion of primitive life 
and as influencing the marriage laws all over the world, and the 
taboo acts like a magical quality. For instance, the Australiax 
native must not eat food killed by certain relations, nor generall) 
food into which such persons “ project their smell.” Here the 
taboo is a quality which affects the food, and would directly 
injure the eater.2. We have seen that over a considerable part 
of the savage world taboo is the method of protecting property 
e.g. in Rotuma the natives are honest, but their honesty arise: 
from the fear that if one touches the food of another the owne! 
might kill him by its means.* In the Melanesian practice * th« 
owner of the property controls the taboo. We are expressly) 


1 Schooleraft, vol. iv. p. 63. According to Schoolcraft-Drake (vol. i. 
p. 188) the Winnebagos attribute their respect for women in war to the direc! 
command of the Great Spirit. Here the sanction is purely religious, but 
we have seen that the conception of the Great Spirit among the Red Indian: 
is the centre of manifold confusion. 

2 Spencer and Gillen, vol. i. p. 469. 

3 Gardiner, J. A. J., vol. xxvii. p. 409. We have referred above to thé 
imprecations pronounced over the boundary-stones by the Babylonians. 
The imprecations would make the stone itself avenge any disturbance o! 
it (Maspero, p. 762). Similarly the stones set up by Laban and Jacok 
are witnesses to the division of the land (Gen. xxxi. 45-52). At a late 
stage the stone has become inanimate, but a curse on any one who shal 
move it is pronounced by the whole people (Deut. xxvii.). The curse is 
still the punishment, though its operation is perhaps theological rather thar 
magical. 

4 Referred to above, Part I. chap. viii.; Part IL. chap. i. 






ETHICAL CONCEPTIONS IN EARLY THOUGHT 421 


‘told that it has no authority from a spirit.1 The infectiousness 
of the taboo is, as we have seen, an important element in early 
‘eriminal law, the offender who has broken the taboo transferring 
its dangerous character to himself, and so not only incurring a 
‘eurse, but also involving himself in the penalty of exclusion from 
‘the community.2. Thus the breaking of taboo carries its own 
punishment. The process works automatically and without 
‘need of the intervention of a spirit. In a quite similar way we 
‘have seen that some forms of oath and ordeal provide automatic 
‘punishments of perjury. A fetish object is laid on the stomach 
‘in Great Bassam, a stone is powdered and drunk in water in 
Wiianti. The operation in both cases is magical.? Often in 
‘early society the laws are protected by a curse pronounced by 
| the people as a whole or by a priest as their representative on any 
‘one who shall break them. ‘Thus, we have the well-known list 
‘of curses in the Book of Deuteronomy, and a quite analogous 
‘set of inscriptions recording the curses pronounced against 
‘offenders in the early Greek states.4 In the same way, paternal 
‘authority is fortified by the power of the parental curse and 
blessing. This action is automatic, and though we may say that 
‘it incorporates an ethical idea it fails to work in strict accordance 
|with ethical conditions. The operation of the magical agency is, 
if the term may be coined, paramoral—working by the side of 
‘the ethical principle, but not always on the same lines. The 
‘point is well illustrated in the story of the sons of Isaac. Jacob 
“secures by fraud the blessing intended for Esau, and once given, 
‘the blessing cannot be withdrawn. It is quite comparable to a 
‘piece of goods made over once for all and not to be resumed. 
‘The most Esau can hope is that the store may not be exhausted— 
‘“ Hast thou not reserved a blessing forme?’ ‘ Hast thou but 
‘one blessing, my father?”’> Yet if the blessing were the true 
expression of the father’s loving gratitude won by good service, 
_Jacob should rather have had a curse for his deceit. 


i 
J 





l 


2. Grotesque as the magical doctrine of punishment appears 
when stated in set terms or illustrated in concrete practice, 


‘1 Codrington, J. A. J., vol. x. p. 279. Compare the use of stones by 
’ Eskimo (Reclus, p. 110, and cf. Tylor on the mending of hedges by a 
‘cotton thread among the Kunama, Contemp. Review, 1873, p. 704). 

2 See Jevons, Introduction to the History of Religion, pp. 70-87. 
‘i Post, A. J., ii. 107, 108.' 
| 4 Deut. xxvii. 15 et seq. Cf. Harrison, p. 142, for selections from the 
‘“ Dirsee of Teos.”? ‘‘ Whosoever maketh baneful drugs against the Teans, 

. may he perish, both he and his offspring,”’ etc, 
5 Gen. xxvii. 36-38. 


422 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


puerile as the whole machinery of magic stones, avenging beans, 
and death-dealing gibberish looks when viewed from behind the 
scenes, yet the conception of an inherent retribution following 
as an automatic consequence of the wrong act lies close to 
the permanent moral consciousness of mankind, closer than the 
alternative theory of punishment ab extra inflicted by a vengeful 
spirit or a just god. For here as elsewhere, the magical doctrine 
merely crystallizes a diffused psychological state into a material 
object or a physical occurrence. We can all put ourselves 
without the slightest difficulty into the mental attitude of the 
savage who breaks a taboo. We have many things that are 
taboo to us and we know what it is to handle them. Whatever 
we believe or disbelieve in religion or in morals, there remain for 
all of us certain things to do which affects us with a greater or 
less degree of mental discomfort, varying from uneasiness to 
acute remorse or the extreme of cold self-horror. These are 
in strictness feelings attendant or consequent upon the action. 
Externalize them, turn what we feel about the act into some 
physical attribute of the thing or person with which the act is 
concerned, some noxious emanation, some death-dealing “ smell,” 
and the feeling becomes a taboo. Once again, take away the 
taboo and at first sight the basis of the feeling seems to be re- 
moved, and moral obligation to disappear. But then comes a 
rational consideration of the whole circumstances of the case— 
the deliberate view of the total effect of the bad act on our own 
character, on the lives and happiness of others, on the social 
order, on everything that we hold in affection and esteem. On 
this view we can see that our horror has its legitimate function, 
that it has grown up as an integral part of the conditions which 
constitute us fit members of a human society, so that before we 
can reason out all that a bad act implies we have a feeling about 
it in which those consequences are in a manner represented. 
Now this feeling is the great permanent fact of the moral con-. 
sciousness persisting through all stages of development. The 
conceptions to which it gives rise vary greatly, and their varia- 
tions affect and are affected by the whole scope and character 
of practical morality, so that their history is the history of moral | 
development. The simplest of all ways of conceiving the facts 
is that of attributing malefic quality to the bad act itself—the 
act, or some person or thing affected by it, taking on itself by 
the primitive mental process of assimilation the quality of the 
mental feeling which arises’in us when the act is contemplated _ 
in our minds. So near, indeed, is this to the permanent tenden- 
cies of the moral consciousness that language to this day speaks — 


H 
’ 


. 


Ns 


ETHICAL CONCEPTIONS IN EARLY THOUGHT 423 


of the act as noble, base, or horrible, as if these were qualities 
attaching to a physical event, and not expressions for feelings 
'which the physical event excites and psychological and social 
consequences that follow from it. 

We may even go a step further, and say that in considerable 
measure wrong-doing is still conceived rather magically than 
ethically. ‘Take, for example, the case of sexual intercourse. It 
is hardly too much to say that for the average moral consciousness 
this is still held to be sanctified by marriage as by the removal 
of a taboo, so that neither the production of children without 
means to maintain them, nor the indulgence of physical passion 
without psychical love, is strongly condemned when covered by 
the ceremony. On the other hand, the woman who breaks the 
taboo uncovered by the ceremony is stamped once for all with the 
scarlet letter, without regard to the question whether she was 
the experienced temptress or one whose fault was merely to have 
loved and trusted too much. She is marked, tabooed. Though 
condemned most loudly by the self-styled ‘‘ moralist,”’ the con- 
demnation of her, in nine cases out of ten, is not really moral— 
that is to say, based on a rational view of her character and its 
potentialities for good and evil, but magical, based on a supposed 
bad quality, acquired once for all by the breach of a taboo, in 
view of which she is a piece of damaged goods in the social 
market. And, like all magical qualities, the taboo is eminently 
infectious, and all respectable women are seen gathering their 
skirts about them to avoid that contact with the offender which 
would communicate the stain to themselves. 

On the other hand, a man may be said to incur a magical 
rather than an ethical condemnation in cases of cowardice and 
perhaps of certain kinds of dishonesty. The “ prison-taint ”’ 
hangs in a measure about one who has ever been convicted and 
degrades -him below much greater criminals who have kept 
within the law. In all these matters the function of the ethical 
thinker is to plead for that rational consideration of character 
and conduct, that cvyyvepy, which is the truest safeguard against 
Pharisaism, and which, making us aware of the extreme fallibility 
of our judgments upon other people, bids us confine such judg- 
ments to the minimum point requisite for regulating our dealings 
with prudence and justice. We must so far “ judge ”’ a convicted 
cheat as to beware of trusting him for the future, but as to the 
intrinsic worth of his character when all is summed up, and how 
it compares with that of many who need no repentance—of this, 
omniscience alone can judge. “ Judge not ’’ is a standing protest 
against magical condemnations, 


424 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


3. Close as the magical judgment stands to the permanent 
conditions of the moral consciousness it is not the only form in 
which the primitive mind conceives the sanction of conduct. 

y As the belief in spirits generally accompanies that in the 
/ efficacy of magic, so the magical conception of punishment very 
readily yields to or blends with the conception of spiritual 
_ intervention. Thus, the oath often takes the form of invoking 
the vengeance of a spirit.1_ In the case of the North American 
Indians we have seen that the spirit and the “ war-medicine ”’ 
worked together to secure self-restraint. The Dakotas attribute 
bad luck in hunting to an offence committed by some of the 
hunter’s family against the spirits of the dead. The taboo on an 
offender may be due to the fact that the spirits are wroth with 
him. Thus, a murderer may be avoided because he is pursued 
by the ghost of his victim and, again, the avenger of blood who 
fails to do his duty may himself be pursued by the indignant 
spirit of his slain relative. We are not, indeed, to suppose that 
the ordinary spirit of animism has a detached or impartial 
interest in human conduct; on the contrary, animism is for the 
most part non-moral, and a good deal of it is immoral. There 
is no reason why the spirit of a river should be any more con- 
cerned with morality than the river itself, while, on the contrary, 
there is some reason why the spirit of a disease should be more 
immoral] than the disease itself, for, abstracted from the spirit 
which guides or animates it, smallpox is not a being which bears 
ill-will to men, but the spirit of smallpox is a monster going about 
seeking whom it may devour, and perhaps demanding sacrifices 
to appease it. Hence, savage animism tends often to what, 
from our point of view, are cruelties and immoralities which 
would otherwise not occur. The spirits of men, however, may 
be naturally expected to look upon conduct just as men them- 
selves do, and consequently will applaud the good and reprobate 
the evilin the same way. Here is a possible means of connecting 
religion with morality which is not left altogether unused in the 
savage world. ‘Thus, the Manes become the natural guardians 
of morality in the family ; the son who kills his father is naturally 
punished by the ghost just as he would be by the living man had 
his blow not been fatal.2 It is but a slight extension of this idea 
that the spirit of the father should avenge other crimes, or that 
the spirits of remoter ancestors should participate in the ven- 


1 Post, Afrikanische Jurisprudenz, ii. 127. 

2 See Leist, p. 314, who quotes Iliad, xxi. 412; Odyssey, xi. 280. The 
only doubt in such passages is whether it is the curse or the ghost of the 
parent which operates, 


Ss 


ETHICAL CONCEPTIONS IN EARLY THOUGHT 425 


-geance, so that the boy who strikes his father or mother “is 


devoted ” to the Div parentum,! or that a similar fate should 
punish other crimes in a family such as incest or cruelty to a 
mother. Again, when customs have been first instituted by 
an ancestor or a predecessor of an heroic age his spirit continues 
to take an interest in their observance, and he is angry with and 
perhaps punishes those who disregard them. As far down in 
the scale as the natives of South-Eastern Australia we find spirits 
of this kind. The tribes north of the Herbert River recognize a 
being called Kohin, who once came down to earth, but now has 
his home in the Milky Way, though he roams about by night on 
earth, killing those whom he meets. He is offended by breaches 
of the marriage taboos, by the eating of forbidden food, or by 
neglect to wear mourning for the prescribed period, and sooner 
or later the offending native dies.® 


4, The spirit of animism, however, is not as such a moral being 
whom wickedness offends : he is concerned only with the conduct 
which affects himself, and so animistic religion often presents 
itself in the mass as wholly non-moral.*’ The savage prays in the 


1 Law of Servius Tullius (Bruns, p. 14). 

* Leist, p. 320, quoting Iliad, ix. 454, and Odyssey, ii. 134. 

3’ Generally speaking, in South-East Australia ‘a belief exists in an 
anthropomorphic supernatural being who lives in the sky, and who is 
supposed to have some kind of influence on the morals of the natives ”’ 
(Howitt, p. 500). 

Mr. Howitt adds that “‘no such belief seems to obtain in the remainder 
of Australia *’; and Messrs. Spencer and Gillen declare still more definitely 
that the Central Australian natives ‘* have no idea whatever of the existence 
of any supreme being who is pleased if they follow a certain line of what 
we call moral conduct, and displeased if they do not do so. They have 
not the vaguest idea of a personal individual other than an actual living 
member of the tribe who approves or disapproves of their conduct, so far 
as anything like what we call morality is concerned ’”’ (Spencer and Gillen, 
vol. ii. p. 491). 

The only possible exception is in the case of the Kaitish tribe, who 
recognize a superior being called Atnatu, who is displeased if the bull-roarer 
is not sounded in the initiation ceremony. 

4 Thus, Captain Ellis denies broadly that there is any connection between 
religion and morals in any of the three peoples of whom he writes (the 
Tshi, the Ewe, and the Yoruba), because, he says, the savage only revenges 
what affects himself (Yoruba, p. 293). Other instances that I have found 
scattered among the accounts of a large number of peoples are the follow- 
ing. In Africa, among the Basonge the ghost of a father appears to his 
son in a dream and chides him for bad conduct (Overbergh, Mon., iii. 
325). Among the Koita of New Guinea the ghost would punish any neglect 
of funeral rites and any, infringement of tribal custom (Seligmann, 
p- 191), while, among the Roro tribes, the ghosts bring good luck, but if 
annoyed by too much quarrelling among the women, may spoil the hunting 
(Seligmann, p. 310). The Fuegians are said to believe in a spirit in the form 
of a big black man, who sends storms when they do wrong (Garson, J. A. I. 


isl 


426 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


simplest and most direct manner for the fulfilment of his desires, 
without the smallest regard to what we should consider moral 
obligations. The warrior does not even stop to explain the 
justice of his cause to the deity as more civilized men are wont 
todo. ‘‘ Great Quahootze,” prays a Nootka Indian in preparing 
for war, “‘let me live, not be sick; find the enemy, not fear him ; 
find him asleep and kill a great many of him.” + 
~The spirit is moved by the same considerations which move 
the savage himself. An offering pleases him and he will pay for 
it. He may be expected to stand by his friends like a primitive 
man, and hate his enemies, according to the same model. For 
the rest, his character is drawn from the object which he animates, 
or the process which he personifies, or the function over which 
he presides. Thus, if he is a disease spirit he is evil, and the very 
living worship of evil spirits together with the comparative neglect 
of those which enjoy a good character is in itself a strong mark 





xv. 145). Where higher gods come into play, the ethical influence is 
more often noted. Thus, among the Coast Salish, the Great Transformer 
will some time descend from heaven again and punish the bad (Boas, 
B. A., 1890, p. 580). The Comanches, according to Schoolcraft (ii. 225), 
believe that the Great Spirit punishes them for lying and other offences. 
Among the Winnibagoes respect for women in war is said to be enjoined 
by the Great Spirit (Schoolcraft, iv. 53). Among the Tsimshian, though 
we do not hear of future retribution, heaven hates murderers, adulterers, 
and foolish talkers, while it loves those who pity the poor and do not try 
to become rich by ‘selling dear (Boas, B. A., 1889, p. 846). 

Among the Blackfeet, the sun is all- beneficent, and good to those who do 
right. Penances are done in the medicine lodge to please him, and a 
woman, anxious for a sick child, builds a lodge to the sun and vows she has 
not committed adultery (Grinnell, Blackfeet Lodge Tales, 258, 264). Among 
the Paharias, he who obeys God’s commands must neither injure, abuse, 
beat, nor kill any one; nor rob, nor steal, nor waste food and clothes; nor 
quarrel ; but he will praise God morning and evening, and women must 
do this too. Such a man is born again as a chief, while others become 
animals (Dalton, p. 265 seq.—some doubt as to authenticity). Among 
the Kayans, Hose and McDougall state that fear of the toh serves as a 
constant check on the breach of customs, while the part which the major 
spirits, or gods, play, remains extremely vague. On the whole, the gods 
make for morality but, “‘ except so far as conduct is accurately prescribed 
by custom and tradition, their influence seems to be negligible ” (ii. 204). 
Among the simple Punans, “‘ religious beliefs probably influence their con-— 
‘duct less strongly than do ‘those of the Kayans ” (ib., p. 187). The Karaya_ 
are said to have no morals in their religion (Ehrenreich, op. ctt., 34). 
In British Guiana, im Thurm denies any connection of morality with anim- 
ism (op. cit., p. 342). The Gonds are said to have no moral deity (Forsyth, 
Highlands of Central India, 145). The Batak religion is said to be wholly 
non-moral (Miiller, op. cit., p. 13). Compare Tylor (Contemporary Review, 
April 1873, p. 710) on the Papuans and Caribs. Speaking generally, 
Professor Tylor considers that savage animism is almost devoid of thes 
ethical element (Primitive Culture, vol. ii. p. 360). 

* Tylor, vol. ii. p. 366, where a number of similar prayers for direct 
material advantages are given. 


ETHICAL CONCEPTIONS IN EARLY THOUGHT 427 


‘of the low ethical standard of animism. As an ancestor who 
cares for the family welfare, as protector of a special place or a 
class of people, or as the avenger who may be called upon in the 
formula of an oath, a spirit may resent injuries or insults affecting 
his authority. It is only in this indirect manner that the lower 
animism provides a sanction of conduct. 
A step forward is taken when spirits arise which are them- 
elves personifications of the moral order, or of some portions 
thereof. We can conceive such impersonations arising either 
on the basis of animistic or of magical conceptions. What is 
_ essential is that they should embody a certain disinterestedness 
which transforms their action from the sphere of mere resent- 
ment to that of justice. Thus, as long as the father’s spirit is 
merely acting in revenge of a personal injury, it is not really a 
moral agency, but if it is held to supervise the family laws 
_ without reference to its own interests, it begins to be a disinter- 
ested judge. Similarly, there is nothing moral in the action of a 
Uirse as such, but if the curse, having materialized into a quasi- 
spirit, is set in motion by certain specified breaches of morality, 
and by those only, it has acquired a more judicial character. 
We seem to see a transition of this kind going on the case of 
the Erinys. At first probably a “ dark-flitting ’ curse which 
can be set in motion, for example, by the angry parent, or the 
despised suppliant, it is already in Homer a spirit dwelling in 
Hades, and a hard-smiting goddess who avenges wrongs. At 
times it seems to come without regard to any other considera- 
tions at the bidding of those who have the right to call on it. 
Thus, for his unwitting sin against his mother, CGidipus suffers 
‘‘ all that the Erinyes of a mother accomplish.” 1 The father of 
Pheenix, though he certainly had little right on his side, called 
on the hateful Erinyes, and his curse was accomplished.? Iris 
reminds Poseidon that the Erinyes always wait upon an elder.® 
At times, too, the Erinyes seem to be carrying out a vicarious 
punishment with a certain blind and mechanical fatality, as when 
the Harpies carry off the daughters of Pandareos, notwithstand- 
ing all the goddesses had done for them, and give them to the 
hateful Erinyes to haunt them on account, apparently, of their 
father’s crime. At other times the Erinyes are rather the 
avengers of certain wrongs, of the despised beggar,° and of the 
broken oath—for which “‘ beneath the earth they punish men.”’ 
Here they are really protectors of certain branches of the moral 
law. Thus, what is at one point merely a curse embodying the 


1 Odyssey, xi. 280. 2 Iliad, ix. 454. 3 4b., xv. 204, 
4 Odyssey, xx. 60-78. 5 40., xvii. 475. 


428 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


resentment of an injured party, becomes at another a spirit 
dwelling in Hades, flitting in the dark and smiting hard when 
set in motion by those who have the power to do so, and in yet 
others a spirit watching over certain branches of morality. In 
the first case, where the curse is a mere instrument of revengeful 
feeling, there is nothing specifically moral. In the last, where 
the curse falls impartially on any breaker of given laws, the 
moral element is clear. Between the two, the curse that can 
be set in motion by definite authorities under definite conditions 
seems, at least in the case of the Erinyes, to be the link.+ 

The Erinys is still the avenger of wrongs done to individuals 
and of special cases of wrong-doing,? but in the goddess Themis 
the Greeks of the Homeric age had a more generalized con- 
ception of a patron of justice. Themis is distinctly a goddess, 
she receives the gods at their gathering for the banquet on 
Olympus,? but she has a double relation.to human justice—in 
the first place, a general oversight; and in the second place, a 
special regard for the divine traditions which are ever growing 
up through the decisions of oracles, the iepa cat dou, and to her 
sphere belong those customary rights which, in early society, 
men who are unprotected by belonging to a family have no 
human means of enforcing, and thus in particular the stranger 
and the beggar and the suppliant are under her care.* 

While the Erinyes and Themis are strictly independent beings, 
their functions become closely associated with the gods,° and 
especially with Zeus, the chief god of Olympus. Zeus acts in 
accordance with Themis. In the Iliad he already punishes un- 
just decisions with storms,® and in his capacity of Zeus Xenios 
is the special protector of the stranger and suppliant. In each 
several capacity he appears under the appropriate name— 

As Zeus Timoros, he is the god of retribution ; as Zeus Hikesios, 
the god to whom the suppliant flies; as Zeus Apotropaios, he is 
the averter of ill; as Zeus Horkios, the god of the oath, who 


1 I am indebted to Mr. A. Sidgwick for a valuable note in which the 
above passages, with others, are collated. 

2 In later thought, as in the well-known fragment of Heraclitus, the 
Erinyes appear as guardians of “law in the universe.” They “ preserve 
the stars from wrong.’’ On the whole subject, see Miss Harrison’s work, 
pp. 213-239, and Leist, pp. 320, 321. 

3 Leist, p. 207; Iliad, xv. 87. 

* Leist, p. 211. 

5 In the case of Phoenix, mentioned above, though the prayer is addressed 
to the Erinyes, the curse is carried out by Zeus of the underworld and 
Persephone. Both Erinyes and gods attend on the beggar (Odyssey, 
xvii. 475). 

§ Iliad, xvi. 385, quoted by Leist, p. 209. 


=e 


ETHICAL CONCEPTIONS IN EARLY THOUGHT 429 


_ punishes perjury, and by whom the Athenian judges swear.1 
The different epithets are themselves half personifications, and 
_ Zeus is in a sense a different being in each capacity, just as in 
the medizval world Our Lady of Embrun was and was not the 
same being as Our Lady of Paris. The function wavers between 
being a god itself and being only the attribute of a god. But in 
the most logical anthropomorphism, Zeus is one god who super- 
vises the moral order generally, and whose punishments are 
carried out by the Erinyes. The spirit of animism serves the 
gods of the higher stage. 

The greatest of the sons of Zeus had also a large part to play 
in the ethics of Greece, and particularly in the side of ethics that 
touches law, statecraft, and inter-state relations. The special 
connection of Apollo with the wodis dates from an early stage of 
his career.? Participation in his sacra is at Athens a test of 
civic status, and he is especially associated with the admission 
as matter of law of a justifiable homicide that needs no more than 
ceremonial purification. Though not ashamed to be a slave- 
owner himself, he assisted in the emancipation of slaves. His 


1 On the moral functions of Zeus, see Farnell, vol. i. p. 64 ff. We geta 
similar development in the Roman religion. Here the tendency to deify 
abstractions, actions, or functions is early and persistent. Thus Saturnus 
suggests no personality, but rather a sphere of operations (whether we 
take the name as referring to sowing or seed maturing in the soil), in which 
a certain nwmen is helpful’? (Warde Fowler, Roman Religious Experience, 
p- 118). It is probable that many of the more specialized function-gods 
(Sondergétter) are of later origin, but if this is so it illustrates the persistence 
of the tendency in the more formal stages of a relatively organized religion 
(2b., pp. 158-164). Now gods of harvest functions have no peculiar moral 
interest, but we also have Spes, Concordia, Pudicitia, Pietas, etc., who 
foster the appropriate qualities. 'These are mere spiritualized abstractions, 
and bear the same relation to Hope, Concord, Modesty, and Piety that the 
spirit of an object does to the object itself. But we also find that the 
function-spirit is associated with one of the greater gods as his epithet : 
for instance, we have Fides associated closely with Jupiter. Fides is the 
spirit who protects the oath; Jupiter as Deus Fidius is the god who pro- 
tects the oath. Public acts of the nation are sworn by Jupiter Lapis, in 
which there is probably the blending of a god with a fetish. While Faith 
is an attribute of Jupiter, Faith has also her own cult and temple close to 
the Temple of Jupiter. In the same way Victoria is worshipped as well as 
Jupiter Victor, and Libertas along with Jupiter Liber. As the tendency 
to personify abstractions persisted in Rome, some of these epithet-gods may 
even be later in time than the gods themselves, but be that as it may, they 
illustrate the same ambiguity between the god and the function which we 
find in the Greek religion. See Wissowa, Religion der Romer, especially 
pp. 22, 47, 48, 103 ff. 

2 Farnell, vol. iv. p. 161. 

3 Whether religion took the lead in this reform, as Dr. Farnell is in- 
clined to think (pp. 177, 306), or whether we should say rather that a higher 
and more human religion provided means of wiping away a stain which 
lower magico-religious ideas first imputed, is a question which cannot in 
this special case be definitely resolved. 


430 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


oracle, without having any idealistic message for Greece, teaches 
the current morality at its best, dwelling on moderation and 
restraint, insisting on the inward side of conduct, denouncing 


perjury and breach of trust.1. But beyond all this Delphi became 


something of a spiritual centre for all Greece, and it was a genial 
centre, making not only for national harmony and inter-state 


justice and good faith, but for higher civilization and artistic and — 


intellectual development. As the guardian of the wéAis Apollo 
was the patron of colonies, and Greek expansion was guided, 


if not stimulated and promoted, from the spiritual capital.? His. 
worship made for the recognition of the common Hellenic bond, 
and is associated with the development of the method of settling: 
inter-state disputes by arbitration which was the needed correc- 
tive to the separation of the Greek states and is the model of 


_ our nascent international justice. The Delphic religion failed 
by the very petpiorys, which was its chief virtue, to raise the 
whole religion of Greece to a higher plane, but it gave the sanction 
of the religious tradition to the workaday morality of the private 
citizen, the jurist, and the statesman, and that—unlike so many 
religions—without let or hindrance but with actual sympathy 
and happiness to the thinker and creator. 


5. In the conception of a supreme god, the protector of the 
whole or of the most essential part of the moral order, we have 
come to the threshold of a spiritual religion, but we have not 
_ yet arrived at the conception of a moral order of the universe, 
nor at the principle that God is good of necessity because he is 
God. The immoralities attributed to the gods of polytheism 
are notorious, and though it is fair to urge that they belong to 
the world of primitive conceptions wherein the gods had their 
birth, still, the very fact that they are retained militates, as the 
Greek philosophers knew, against a spiritual religion. The gods 
themselves suffered punishment for their wrong-doing. Apollo 
was compelled to become the slave of a mortal, and a regular 
penalty of eight years passed without nectar or ambrosia lay 
upon the Olympians who swore falsely by the Styx. If the 
gods are interested in sin, they are appeasable by sacrifice, and 
for occult reasons which the polytheist never made clear to him- 
self, but which were associated with his conception of vicarious 
responsibility, the gods themselves put the impulse to sin into 

1 Farnell, [V. 211. For the betrayal of the suppliant, cf. the well-known 
story of Glaucus (Herodt., VI. chap. 86). Perhaps more remarkable for a 
richly endowed oracle is the doctrine of the widow’s mite (Farnell, 210) 


and the depreciation of magical purification (7b., 212). 
2 4b., 200. 


ETHICAL CONCEPTIONS IN EARLY THOUGHT 431 


— ee 


men’s minds. The Ate, which compels a man to folly or crime, 
is a curse implanted in his mind by that same Erinys who will 
avenge the deed, and punish him for following the impulse 
‘implanted by herself.4 
6. Meanwhile, the connection of religion with morals develops 
on another line; the misfortunes which follow wrong-doing may 
not be manifested in this life, but whether conceived as the 
automatic consequences of the act, or as due to the wrath of 
the spirits, they may fall upon the soul in its life beyond the 
grave. In an elementary form the conception of retribution in 
a future life appears within the savage world, and though in 
many cases it is probably imported from civilized religions, 
there is no reason to doubt that there are uncivilized peoples 
among whom it has grown up spontaneously. The normal 
theory of animism, however, conceives the soul as continuing to 
live a life comparable to that which it enjoyed upon this earth, 
and dependent upon similar conditions. Its well-being depends, 
not upon its own actions in this life, but upon its receiving 
proper care from relations and descendants after death. It 
must be suitably buried, properly housed, and duly fed. And 
this remains the dominant conception upon which notions of duty 
to the dead depend, even when other elements enter in. These 
elements appear in different forms which are by no means wholly 
ethicalin character. Sometimes the future life is itself a privilege 
of caste, as among the Tongans.2? Sometimes the fate of the 
dead depends on the manner of death. Among the Nairs the 
childless woman will suffer in the future, a conception which 
perhaps connects itself rather with the necessity of the support 
of the dead soul by children than with retribution proper.* 
1 Odyssey, xv. 233, cited by Leist, p. 321. Compare Iliad, xix. 87, where 
Agamemnon excuses his folly (éya & ov« attids eiur) because “* Zeus and 
Fate and dark-flitting Erinys’’ put a wild infatuation into his mind. 
The infatuation (%7rn) three lines lower is herself a goddess and daughter 
of Zeus, ““ who moves through the heads of men injuring them ”’—a capital 
instance of the interchange between magically conceived quality and spirit. 
At a later date, especially in Aischylus, there is an attempt to elaborate the 
theory of Ate upon the principle of vicarious justice. A father brings down 
a curse which besets the children and the children’s children, all of whom 
add to the guilt until the accumulated iniquity is washed out by a tre- 
mendous catastrophe. In Herodotus we have a similar order of ideas, 
but with a special stress on the overweening presumption of the individual 
which awakens the jealousy of God and brings down punishment. 
2 Tylor, vol. ii. p. 22. Sometimes the dead retain in a future life the 
social position they held in this: e.g. among the Yoruba (Ellis, p. 127). 
8 Thus, among the Micronesians, those who die in peace reach Paradise 
while others fall into hell (Wajitz, vol. v., li. p. 142). 
4 Reclus, p. 159. 


432 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


Among the Western Eskimo the soul has choice of two abodes, 
one above and one at the bottom of the sea, which is preferred 
as less inclement. Here dwell heroic whalers, men who have 
committed suicide rather than burden their families, and well- 
tattooed women who have died in childbirth; others get there 
only by crossing a narrow bridge, or by other dangerous and 
hurtful paths. The Ainu hold that while all spirits go to Hades, 
the good pass on to the place of God, and the wicked to the wet. 
underground world, a message from the Creator being sent 
through the fire-goddess to direct where the soulis to go.2 Often 
the warriors retain their supremacy in the world to come: the 
primitive Norseman continued to fight and to feast in Walhalla, 
and similarly the Tupinambas of Brazil think that those who 
have lived well—+z. e. those who have well avenged themselves 
and eaten many enemies—will live in beautiful gardens, while 
cowards will be tormented.? Generally speaking, the savage 
view of the future life, in proportion as it deserts the strict theory 
of the continuance of the present mode of life, is ill defined and 
extremely confused. The soul haunts the grave, and requires 
supplies, and yet it goes to another world, or is reincarnated in 
another human being or an animal. How far it is really the 
merits of the deceased that determine his fate and how he is 
judged, or by what method his sins are weighed against his 
virtues, it is generally very difficult to determine. The evidence 


1 Reclus, p. 103. Among the Central Eskimo those who have been 
kind to the poor and hungry, and have been happy on this earth, those who 
have been killed by accident, suicide or violence, and women who have 
died in childbirth, get to heaven; while murderers, the unkind, other 
offenders, and those who die of disease go to Sedna’s house and cannot 
leave it (Boas, R. B. E., 1885, p. 590). Among the Behring Straits 
Eskimo, those who die naturally go to the underworld, but thieves, 
sorcerers, witches, are in some way uncomfortable after death (Nelson, 
R. B. E., xviii. 423). 

2 Batchelor, The Ainu of Japan, p. 236. 

3 Tylor, vol. li. p. 86. Other instances of savage belief in retribution 
are quoted by Tylor, p. 93. 

4 Among a large number of ethnographical papers chosen for ac- 
counts of secular custom I have found the following references to Future 
Retribution— 

In North America the Creeks are said to believe in future retribution 
(Bartram, Trans. Am. Ethn. Society, 1853, p. 27); so did the Natchez (Le 
Petit, in the Jesuit Relations, vol. Ixviii. p. 129). 

Among the Haidah, murderers, thieves, those who disobeyed the shaman, 
were tormented in the cloud region, or if especially bad were turned into 
bears (Harrison, J. A. J., xxi. p. 19). 

Among the Western Déné, while the soul generally lived miserably on 
dry toads (Hill-Tout, Ethnology of North America, 178), it would seem that 
virtuous people might get a new birth (Morice, Proceedings of the Canadian 
Institute, vol. vii. p. 161). 

Among the Nootka the world of souls is in the earth, but chiefs and 


ETHICAL CONCEPTIONS IN EARLY THOUGHT 433 


taken as a whole indicates that a notion of future retribution 
arises occasionally in animistic religion in qualification of the 


‘good men who always pray to the sun and moon, go to heaven (Boas, 
1890, p. 597). 

The Loucheux are said to believe in future retribution (Hardisty, 
Smithsonian Reports, 1866, p. 318). 

But of the Hastern Déné it is said that their dim conception of the Great 
Spirit has no influence on conduct because there is no future retribution 
(Ross, 2b., p. 306). 

The Lillooet thought that the soul of a man who had not supplicated the 
chief, or danced properly, would be lost (Teit, Jeswp Hxpedition, p. 277). 
Among the Ojibways there was a happy place for the good departed, while 
cowards wandered in the darkness (P. Jones, History of the Ojibway 
Indians, p. 102). Among the Omaha, the spirit survives. According to two 
natives, the old men used to say the good men go to the good spirit and the 
bad to the bad one. The whole conception seems very vague (Dorsey, 
Siouan Oults, pp. 419-420). 

The Assiniboins are said to believe that, when they get South, the good 
and brave find women and buffaloes, while the wicked and cowardly are 
confined to an island without pleasures (op. cit., 484-485). 

The Mandans also hold that the existence of the dead in the South 
depends on the nature of their life in this world, but here there is some 
evidence of white influence (p. 512), while the Hidatsa have the bridge 
story (p. 513). 

The Paressi believe in future retribution, but probably under Christian 
influence (Von der Steinen, p. 435). 

Among the Caribs, in the seventeenth century, it was thought that the 
dead would go to the Fortunate Islands, but cowards to a barren island, 
where they would be slaves (De Rochefort, p. 43). 

The Padam Abors hold some sort of retribution, probably under Hindu 
influence (Dalton, 22). 

The Badagas believe in retribution, and enumerate the possible sins of 
the deceased in order to avert it (J. F. Metz, p. 82). 

They also let loose a calf at the funeral to bear the sins (Metz, and Rivers, 
The Todas, p. 377). A calf also figures in the Toda ceremony, possibly 
with the same significance. 'The Toda dead have to cross a bridge and the 
bad fall into a kind of purgatory, which, however, does not seem to have 
much influence on the people (Rivers, p. 399). 

The Sonthals hold by retribution (E. G. Man, Sonthalia, p. 142). 

The Sakai and Jakun build a house for the soul, and the Semang place 
food and drink on the grave. But it also seems that the souls have to cross 
a bridge, where the wicked fall into a boiling lake. We may here assume 
an external influence grafted on a primitive continuance theory (W. W. 
Skeat, J. A. I., xxxii. 135, 138, and see below). 

Among the Singpho, good spirits live in the sky, while bad ones become 
tigers and insects. In the plain the Buddhistic myth of the bridge across 
boiling water appears (Wehrli, J. A. E., xvi. 52). 

The Bataks of Palawan are said to believe in future judgment and 
retribution, but this may be due to Christian influence, as their burial 
ceremony suggests continuance (Venturillo, I. A. H., xviii. 140). 

Among the Chenshu, the Atkoor soul goes to God or becomes an evil 
spirit. The Nundials, on the other hand, are said to know nothing of God 
or the soul (Newbold, J. R. A. S., viii. 277). 

Among the Larrakiah, Foelsche says that a man in the ground, who made 
the first blacks, registers deeds in a book and requites them, but this notion 
must obviously be imported (J. A. I., xxiv. 192). 

In West Victoria the double survives, and the fire is kept up for its 


FF 


434 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


continuance theory, but that it is not the prevailing belief at this 
stage. Where found it is partial—certain special qualities or 





comfort for three days. The good goes to a happy land and those that 
are bad to evil spirits below the earth; but this belief may be due to white 
influence (Dawson, Aust. Aborig., 51). 

Among the Gournditch Mara of this region, however, Stahle (Kam. and 
Kur., p. 278) also mentions future retribution, and states that it preceded 
white influence. 

Among the Huahlayi, there are three deadly sins which keep the spirit 
constantly moving in the lower world, where all is dark but for big fires. 
These are unprovoked murder, lying to the elders, or stealing women within 
the prohibited class (Mrs. K. L. Parker, op. cit., p. 78). At the death of a 
man—not of a woman—there was a prayer to Baiamee to let the dead enter 
heaven because he had kept the Boorah laws. 

In the Banks Islands, food is shared with the dead (Codrington, p. 271), 
but here ghosts of bad character are kept out of the land of the dead, 
e. g. a murderer by the ghost of the slain, and such ghosts, fearing to go to 
the bad place, turn back to earth, eat men’s souls, and are wretched. 

In Pentecost Island a murdered man tells other ghosts, who refuse to 
receive the ghost of the murderer (Codrington, p. 288). 

The’ Basonge soul (Overbergh, Monog. iii. 324) goes to God and lives 
in a village within the earth. But he only keeps souls who have slandered 
their village, and others are re-born after a few months. 

There are here about a score of instances which are probably free from 
white influence. But in nearly all it will be seen the belief is very partial— 
some particular offence or fashion being singled out—and very vague. 

I noted also the following cases of continuance apparently without 
retribution, without including several in which continuance appears to be 
implied by the funeral customs but is not explicitly ascribed as a belief. 


Continuance Theory— 

Upon the Pacific Coast the Kwakiutl hold that the dead continue like 
the living (Boas, B.A., 1889, p. 847. 

Among the 7'simshian the dead go to a place similar to that of the living 

abid.). 
The Thlinkeet think that those who die a violent death go to heaven, 
and those who die naturally to a country beyond the earth (7bid., 843). 
According to Swanton, an unavenged man could not get up to the higher 
regions; and bad persons are said to go to the Ravens’ home. But this is 
possibly due to white influence (Rf. B. H., xxvi. 461). 

Among the Eskimo of Labrador a future life depends partly on conduct 
but mainly on the manner of death (Turner, R. B. H., xi. 192). 

On the Thompson River some souls are turned back by guardians from 
the Sunset Land, but for what reason I do not know (Teit and Boas, 
Jesup Expedition, 1900, p. 342). 

Among the Hidatsa the soul goes to a place for the dead, where it receives 
the same regard for his qualities as here (Washington Matthews, Ethnology 
and Philology of the Hidatsa Indians, p. 49). 

Among the Delaware the soul went South to a happy land, and on return 
was born again (Brinton, The Lenni Lenape and their Religion, p. 69). 

Among the Iroquois how far future punishments were recognized is 
uncertain, but the journey to the South world certainly required supplies, 
whence the burial property of the dead (Morgan, League of the Iroquois), 

. 168, 174). , 
ee The Shushwap believed in a happy land for the dead (Teit, Jesup 
Lixpedition, 600). 

The Dakotas, according to Schoolcraft (vol. i. p. 197), have no ideas 


- = ee, 


ETHICAL CONCEPTIONS IN EARLY THOUGHT 435 


acts being selected for reward or punishment—vague and un- 
systematic. At this stage, in short, the belief is in a rudimentary 








of future retribution. According to Riggs (Contributions to Ethnology, 1893, 
p. 213), the soul continues but its destiny is obscure. 

Among the Blackfeet the souls go off among the sandhills, where they 
can be seen in the distance. They live for ever and their occupation is to 
fight with the Crees (Wilson, B. A., 1887, p. 187). They are also said to 
prowl about the lodges, seeking to do injury (Grinnell, Blackfeet Lodge 
Tales, p. 273). 

Among the Kootenay the dead are said to go to the sun (Chamberlain, 
B. A., 1892, p. 559). 

Among the Greenland Eskimo there are two regions for the dead but no 
clear retribution. The mode of death and the treatment of the body 
affect the destination (Nansen, Eskimo Life, pp. 234-237). 

Among the Hoopa in California, shamans and singers at the dance go to 
the sky; all others, without regard to good and evil, go to the underworld 
(Goddard, Univ. Calif. Pub. I. p. 74). Kroeber (Religion of the Indians in 
California, iv. p. 346) says that no ideas of future rewards and punish- 
ments based on conduct in this life have yet been found in this region. 
The dead go below the world, or cross the ocean and are occupied in dances. 
Powers, however, found traces of retribution among the Wintun and the 
Yurok (Tribes of California, pp. 58, 240). These may very well be importa- 
tions from the white man. 

_ The Comanches believe that the dead go to a happy land (Ten Kate, 
Revue d’Eth., vol. iv. p. 134). 

' Among the Similkameem the spirits of the dead were vindictive and had 
to be appeased by feasts, but the soul might pass into an animal (Mrs. 
Allison, J. A. J., xxi. 310, 313). 

Among the Shingu spirits retain the characteristics of this life. There 
is no true retribution (Von der Steinen, p. 349). 

The Karaya dead re-visit the village. There is no belief in retribution 
(Ehrenreich, Veréff Kon. Mus., Band I. p. 34). 

In British Guiana there is both an idea of transmigration and of a country 
beyond the sky, but no future retribution (im Thurm, Among the Indians 
of Guiana, pp. 349, 359). 

Among the Guaycurus souls of chiefs and of medicine men go to the moon. 
Those of common people roam about the plain (Von Martius, i. 233). 

The Ges appear to hold a continuance theory, as they dig up the dead 
man after a year, tell him all that has happened, and re-bury him (Von 

Martius, p. 291). 

The Araucanian dead re-visit the earth as spirits (Latcham, J. A. I., 
Xxxix. 345). 

Among the Aucas the future life is across the sea in a rich land (D’Orbigny, 
Voyages, ii. 258). 

Among the Mataccos the spirits of the dead go to an underworld, but 
if not buried, wander unrecognized (Pelleschi, Hight Months on the Gran 
Chaco, p. 87). 

Among the Chahkata arms and clothes are placed in the grave, but the 
chiefs deny survival and say that the custom is a mark of affection and 
reluctance to use the dead man’s things (Dalton, p. 19). 

_ The Miris provide the dead with all the necessaries for a journey 
(Dalton, p. 29 seq.). AME 
_ Among the Gonds the spirit of the head of the house haunts it until laid 
after a year or two, and meantime is worshipped (Crooke, IL. p. 435). 

Among the Oraons men who are killed by tigers become tigers, otherwise 

there is said to be no survival; yet rice is put in the mouth of the corpse 


436 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


state. In the higher stages of polytheism, on the other hand, 
the theory of the future life is often, though not always, more 


and a coin is given to it, and we are told they believe in ghosts (Dalton, 
p. 247 seq.). 

Among the Bheels food for his journey is placed by the corpse and 
afterwards thrown into the water by the side of which he is burnt (Crooke, 
If. p. 50). 

The views of the Kubu are very uncertain. Van Dongen could find no 
trace of religious belief among the Ridan Kubu. In another tribe they 
say they go back whence they came. The Djambi Kubu are said to have 
no cult and no future life. ‘The Lekho Kubu worship ancestors, but future 
life has no more moral implications than things that depend on chance 
(Hagen, op. cit., pp. 143-145). 

The Korwa recognize no retribution (Crooke, North-West Provinces, I1I. 
332). 

The Orang Bukit are said to have no belief in persistence after death 
(Knocker, J. A. J., xxxvii. 293). 

The Bataks practise temporary burial for a period during which the 
ghost floats about the earth. No future retribution (Muller, Batak 
Sammlung, pp. 12, 13). 

The Sakai. The Krau Sakai bury utensils with the dead but believe in 
retribution. The Bra Sakai also leave utensils with the dead but deny 
any future life and have no retribution. The Central Sakai leave the body 
in a hut, where it should be taken by a tiger (Wilkinson, Papers on 
Malay Subjects—* The Aboriginal Tribes,” p. 46). 

Among the Punans the dead cross a river and there is no future retribu- 
tion (Hose and McDougall, ii. chap. xix.). 

The Waralido not know where the soul goes (Wilson, J. R. A.S., 1843, p.20). 

The Katodis burn the dead and know nothing of a future life (Wilson, 
J. R. A. S., 1843, pp. 7, 26). 

Among the Australians on the Swan River the soul feels chilled, and so 
fires are lighted after the burial. If aman is killed with a spear-thrust, the 
soul remains on the point, which is burnt that it may depart (Salvado, 
J. A. I., vii. 289). 

In N.-W. Queensland there is no future retribution (W. E. Roth, 
op. cit., p. 161). 

In Victoria the ghost would haunt the relatives if not avenged (Brough 
Smyth, Natives of Victoria, I. 107). 

In New South Wales the ghost haunts the grave and the camp is deserted 
after death (Frazer, op. cit., p. 83). 

The dead Narrinyeri warriors go to the stars, yet may also walk the earth 
and injure their enemies (Taplin, in Woods’ Native Tribes, p. 17). 

Those of Encounter Bay have a future life with Nurrunduri, a tribal 
hero, but recognize no retribution (Meyer, in Woods, p. 206). 

At Port Lincoln the soul goes to:an island but needs no food. There is 
probably no original idea of future retribution. They seem to think that 
misfortune in this life may follow misconduct (Schiirmann, in Woods’ 
Native Tribes, p. 235). 

In Queensland (J. D. Lang, Queensland, pp. 274-279) asserts a dim idea 
of a future life, but no judgment and, in fact, no religion. 

The Mycoolon and allied tribes have a place for the dead in the sky, 
where they are looked after by a spirit (Palmer, J. A. JI., xiii. 291). 

Among the Kamilaroi and allied tribes, according to Ridley (J. A. J., il. 
269), some say that the good go to Baiamee, while the bad perish; others 
that all alike go to him; and yet others that the dead becomes a bird. 

The tribes about Lake Hyre (Howitt, J. A. I., xx. 89) say that the spirit 
goes to the sky, but that the Mura Mura punishes offences during lifetime. 


; 


ETHICAL CONCEPTIONS IN EARLY THOUGHT 437 


precise. Among the Greeks, one view was that the heroes passed 
to the Elysian fields, while at any rate the worst criminals were 





' Howitt (pp. 432-434) mentions numerous Sowth Australian tribes in 


which the dead appear as ghosts or go to the sky, but I do not see any case 


of retribution among them. 


In the Western Torres Straits the soul wanders near the body at first, 
then goes to a Western island, but returns at nights (Cambridge Expedition, 


vol. v. p. 355). 


In the Hastern Torres Straits ghosts finally went under the sea and hence 
to a distant land (op. cit., vol. vi. p. 252). 
Among the Batua the dead may appear, and are then appeased with a 


hut and food. They may also pass into the beasts (Hutereau, Congo 
Belge, p. 6). 


The Azande bury amulets with the dead to help him to avenge himself 
(ib., p. 22). 

The Banza negroes and the Bantu of the Congo hold by transmigration 
(Johnston, ii. 362). 

The Bayaka have an imperishable soul—doshi. A man slain in battle 


sends his doshi to avenge him. Big animals also have doshi (op. cit., 


-p. 641). 


Among the Bahuana the doshi lingers in the air after death, visiting 


friends and haunting enemies, and persecuting relatives if the burial is 
not proper (Torday and Joyce, J. A. J., xxxvi. 291). 


The Bangala connect the dead with the living by a tube (p. 649) and the 


_ Mangbetu build a hut and bring food, which gives “ pleasure ”’ to the dead. 


Similar customs are found in many other Congolese tribes (pp. 650-652). 


Van Overbergh (Mon., iv.) says that the Mangbetu place food in a hut 


for the dead, away in the bush, so that he may go there. They comfort 


-asmoker by putting a pipe in his tomb. The future life depends not on 


merit but on rank (pp. 359, 377). 
The Ababua corpse takes the nutritive part from the food set for it 


| (Halkin, Monographie Ethnographique, i. 95). 


The Bangala (Van Overbergh, Mono. Hthn., i. 271) think that ghosts 
may return and kill people or enter eggs. Their view of future life seems 
uncertain, but there is certainly no retribution, and it would appear 
to depend on the status here. One account says that the soul goes to 
Djakombu (pp. 271-278). 

Among the Mayombe (Van Overbergh, ii. 305) views of the future life 
seem to differ. Probably the ghost remains in the forests. Gifts of food 
are continued only while they are remembered (p. 289). 

Among the Nandi (Hollis, p. 41) the shadow goes underground and enjoys 


: the same fortunes as in this life. There is no retribution. 


Among the Masai the ordinary soul perishes with the body, but that of 


- arich man or medicine man turns into a snake, and looks after his children, 


while some people are so important that their souls go to heaven (Hollis, 


pp. 307-308). 


Among the Melanesians the soul continues after death (Codrington, 
p. 207), but in what way it is difficult to find. In some islands its abode 


_ is above, in others below the ground. 


| 


In British New Guinea the Koita soul goes to a mountain and lives just as 
on the earth, both as to rank, character, etc. Their life seems to be about 
as long as that of their memory on earth (Seligmann, op. cit., p. 190). 

Among the Rora the dead go to a place in the bush where food abounds, 
but on the way an evil spirit, like fire, intercepts them and asks if their 
nose and ears are pierced, in which case he directs them on. 

Among the Southern Massim, the shadow spirits go to a world 
which is just like this but inverts day and night. They are received by 


438 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


cast into Tartarus. The Egyptian soul underwent a regular 
trial before Osiris, and the Mexicans had a Book of the Dead, 
similar to that of the Egyptians, giving a full account of the 
dangers through which the soul must pass, and in particular of 
its trial before the Judgment-seat of Tezcatlipoca.1 Thus the 
highest polytheism shows a tendency to the development and 
| systematization of the vague ideas of retribution floating here 
and there through early religious beliefs, into an elaborate 
doctrine of future judgment. The development, however, is 
very irregular. We find nothing of it, for example, in the 
Babylonish religion, nor, till monotheism was well established, 
in that of the Hebrews; its place in the regular Greek cults is 
secondary, particularly in the earlier period, and it is only in 
connection with the Orphic mysteries that it comes to occupy a 
central position. In India, as we shall see, the rival doctrine of 
transmigration tends to take its place, though the two theories 
are also combined. 


7. But the imperfect morality of the doctrine of future retribu- 
tion is most apparent when we turn to the methods by which sin 
is purged away and future happiness is secured. This introduces 
us to a group of ethical problems which at every stage are treated 
in close connection with the prevailing conception of the ethical 
basis. ‘These problems centre upon the relation of the imperfect 
human being to the moral law. By what internal merit or 
external grace preventing him does a man come to reject evil and 
choose good? How does he grow in grace? When he has done 
wrong what means of reconciliation are open to him? ‘These 
are questions of what might be called moral dynamics, of the 
forces which the prevalent ideal of conduct can bring to bear 
on the individual. As such their character must clearly be 
determined primarily by the nature of the grounds on which 
morality is conceived to rest. At a later stage these questions 
are clearly recognized as questions of moral psychology. We 


a being who lives there with wife and children, and who assigns them their 
gardens (Seligmann, p. 655). 

The Tube Tube, after burial, go to a hill on another island, where they 
live like men (p. 657). 

These two sets of instances, taken as they are at random from authorities 
selected for other reasons, fall in with the view that, apart from civilized 
influence, the theory of retribution is the rarer among simple peoples, which 
is also vague and very partial. 

1 Payne, vol. ii. p. 406. In Yucatan also there was a distinction between 
the Happy Land, where the good men and virgins went, and the evil log 
which befell the wicked after death (Waitz, vol. iv. p. 311). 


. 
'} 


' 
; 
' 


i 


ETHICAL CONCEPTIONS IN EARLY THOUGHT 439 


have now to see how they are treated in the lower strata of 


ethical thought. 


; 
’ 


In the early stages of moral development men have, broadly 
speaking, two methods of dealing with their sins, one affiliating 
itself to the magical, the other to the religious conception of 


_ wrong-doing, while as before the two are not infrequently blended 


into one. Under the magical conception sins, if we may so call 
them, are, like other evils, things that can byappropriate methods 
be purged out of a man or a place or a community. They may 
be transferred to a scapegoat, taken from those who have com- 
mitted them, put into the animal or man who is to bear them, 


and driven away into the wilderness or destroyed. They may 


be got rid of by a solemn formula in which the wrong-doer 
repudiates them, swears them off, while magical ceremonies are 
at the same time performed to complete their destruction. On 
the other hand, where the wrong-doer is held to offend some 
spirit, the curative process would naturally consist in either 
quelling, subduing, driving away that spirit, or in appeasing and 
reconciling it. The former process will closely connect itself 
with magical arts, the latter leads on to the sacrifices which form 
the central feature of the cult of the gods. 

The expulsion of evils by transferring them to a man or an 
animal is frequently performed on behalf of the whole com- 
munity; it is familiar to us from the scapegoat to whom the 
sins of the Children of Israel were transferred on the Day of 
Atonement. Laden with these sins, the beast was driven away 
into the wilderness and the people were free. Among the 
aborigines of China the ills and disasters of the people during 
the past year are represented by stones and. bits of iron which 
are placed in a jar and blown up.! It is not necessarily sin or 
wrong-doing that is thus destroyed. Some Chinese tribes pro- 
tect themselves from pestilences by selecting a man to attract 
all the evil influences into him by certain rites, after which he 
is driven away from the village.2_ Ghosts may be driven off 
like other evil influences.? Thus the homicide, even the suc- 
cessful warrior, must be washed to rid himself of the ghost of 
the slain, and the same process may be applied to the weapons 
used to commit the deed. The purification by which the ghost 
or evil influence is expelled lends itself in our minds to an ethical 
interpretation, but we see from the fact of its application to 


1 Frazer, 2nd ed., vol. iii. p. 106. 2 2b., p. 104. 

8 ib,, vol. i. p. 334 ff., quotes the practice of the Basutos, etc., and 
refers to the driving away of the ghost by the Arunta alluded to above, and 
to the taboos placed in various parts of the world upon those who have slain 
@ man. 


440 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


actions which the savage regards as not only innocent but laud- 
able, that it is rather the supposed physical influence, whether 
ghostly or magical, that is dreaded and that the purifying rites 
have to remove! The slayer of his own kindred who has com- 
mitted a moral offence will also undoubtedly have to undergo 
purification. But in this respect he is merely on the level with 
the lauded slayer of an enemy. Both alike may be haunted; 
that the one is haunted for an act held immoral is an accident ; 
he is not haunted because the act is immoral, nor is the act 
immoral because he is haunted. He is haunted because he has 
angered a spirit, a thing which another man may do in the course 
of his duty to his friends or his community. All that we can 
say at this stage is that immoral actions are among those which 
incur the wrath of spirits or the breaking of a taboo, but so little 
is the moral conception differentiated from the general vague 
mass of doubt and fear with which primitive man views the 
effect of his conduct upon the influences that surround him, that 
the righteous and the unrighteous, the good and the bad, in so 
far as they bring those influences into play are all lumped to- 
gether under the one designation of that which is tabooed or set 
apart from ordinary use and from contact with humanity. To 
us the holy and the unclean stand at opposite poles of thought, - 
but in the primitive world they are not yet distinct. The 
Polynesian ‘“‘ taboo,” the Latin “‘sacer,’”’ the Greek “ hagios,”’ 
are simply the things set apart for the gods or the spirits, or 
separated from the use of man, because filled with dangerous 
influences. If we translate “‘sacer’’ by our word “sacred,” we 
must say the parricide is sacred. Of course, he was not sacred, 
but he was set apart for the vengeance of the family god. Simi- 
larly the city of the idolaters devoted to destruction by the 
Hebrew invaders is not sacred in our sense, nor were their posses- 
sions too holy to touch as we conceive holiness. Rather were 
they unclean and accursed. They were like the holy things only 


1 After visiting a grave among the Ainu, Mr. Batchelor was beaten and 
brushed down with magic wands to drive away evil influences and diseases 
(op. cit., p. 221). Similar ideas underlie primitive mourning generally. 

2 Compare Frazer, vol. i. p. 340 ff. Any alarming incident that causes 
danger may require purification to avert it. Thus in North Aracan, 
on the occasion of a death by accident, or through an animal, or in 
childbirth, the whole village is tabooed, while the homicide, or man 
wounded by a wild beast, must abstain from flesh for several months 
(St. John, J. A. I., 2seq.). Among the Ngurla, people who have been 
absent when a relative dies must not speak on their return to camp till 
they have stood the spear-throwing ordeal (Curr, Australian Race, i. 
289). Howitt (p. 452) reports a similar practice among the Wiimbaio. 
For cone attaching to homicide, incest, etc., see above, Part i. chap- iil. 
pp. 88-91. 


ETHICAL CONCEPTIONS IN EARLY THOUGHT 441 


in this, that they were set apart for Jehovah to do what he would 
with them.t 

The purification of the community from all ills, physical and 
moral, is often an annual affair, and since it is necessary that 
all transgressions which involve the possibility of calamity must 
be known in order to be got rid of, it is sometimes preceded 
by an annual confession of sins.2, The Creek Indians, for ex- 
ample, held a ceremony called the “‘ Busk”’ every summer, in 
the course of which “all the men who were not known to have 
violated the law of the first-fruit offerings and that of marriage 
during the year’ were summoned to hold a solemn fast. All 
impure people were kept apart, also fasting, and after other 
ceremonies a new fire was kindled which was held to atone for 
all great crimes except murder.® 


8. But the simplest method for ridding oneself of sins is 
merely to deny or repudiate them in the proper form which 
the tradition of the priest assures the sufferer to be efficient in 
ridding him of the load of guilt. This method of purification 
was highly developed in Babylonia, and also plays an important 
part in the Egyptian conceptions of the future judgment. In 
‘Babylon there seems to have been no question of reward or 
punishment in a future life, but there was a very strong con- 
viction that a god or demon might be given an opening for 
attack upon a man by any of his sins of commission or omission. 
Hence the so-called penitential psalms of the Babylonians and 
the incantation texts which throw so strong a light upon their 
ethical ideas. It has been rightly pointed out that the peni- 
tential psalms have many of the characteristics of magical 
formule. “‘ The lapse ’’ in them “from the ethical strain to the 
incantation refrain is as sudden as it is common.” There is no 

1 Compare Frazer, vol. i. p. 343, etc. 

2 The tribes of Guatemala are said to have made confession of sins 
(Waitz, vol. iv. p. 265) in time of calamity. In Yucatan there was a 
private confession followed by a kind of baptism, the purpose of which 
was to remove evil spirits (ib., pp. 306, 307). The Iroquois practised a 
public confession at their religious festivals, but Morgan considers that 
they had perhaps learnt this from the Jesuits (The League of the Iroquois, 
p. 170). The conception was further developed in Mexico, where confession 
was demanded once in a lifetime, and penances were imposed including 
blood-letting and fasting, the sacrifice of a slave, and benevolence to the 
sick and needy; from our point of view a curious confusion of barbarous 
and moral methods of winning divine favour. These penances might avert 
punishment (Waitz, vol. iv. p. 129). 

8 Frazer, vol. ii. p. 330, etc. Among the Central Eskimo, the Angakog 
visits a sick man and requires confession, e. g. if he has worked or eaten when 


forbidden, and if so atonement is required, as exchange of wives or the 
adoption of a child (Boas, Rf. B. E., vi. 592). 


442 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


question in them of retribution proper nor of genuine contrition. 
The psalm is an enumeration of possible causes of suffering. 
The mere mention of the right cause goes a long way to relieve 
it, especially if the priest calls upon the right spirit. Hence 
the length of the list of sins, which is due to the desire to make 
it exhaustive. “Speaking the right words, and pronouncing 
the right name constituted, together with the correct ceremony 
and the bringing of the right sacrifice, the conditions upon which 
depends the success of the priest in the incantation ritual.’ 4 
Here is an illustration— 


“O that the wrath of my lord’s heart return to its former 
condition, 
O that the god who is unknown be pacified, 
O that the goddess unknown be pacified. 
O that the god known or unknown be pacified, 
O that the goddess known or unknown be pacified. . . . 
The sin I have committed, I know not... . 
The sin I have committed, change to mercy, 
The wrong I have done, may the wind carry off, 
Tear asunder my many transgressions as a garment, 
My god, my sins are seven times seven, forgive me my sins.” 2 


It is in keeping with the same line of thought that the in- 
cantation texts appear as a list of all possible sins, by which 
the patient who is suffering from misfortune, from fever or from 
the headache demon, who seems to have been particularly active 
in the Babylonian swamps, might have been placed under the 
ban. The reciter of the incantation calls on the great gods, 
“lords of redemption, on behalf of so-and-so, who is sick, wretched, 
or in trouble, has offended his gods, spoken evil, despised father 
or mother,” and so forth,® and he demands on the chair, by the 
bellows, by the writing-table, by the halidom of his lord and lady, 
that the ban be taken off. He calls on the gods of the master 
of the house, the god of the sinner, or the great gods “as many as 
are present,” the “‘ pan of coals—thou child of Ea,’’ to come and 
extinguish the sins, transgressions and bonds of so-and-so, and 
banish his curse. The oddly placed invocation to the coal- 
scuttle is a reference to the ritual where the sin or curse was 
burnt up.* In another process the table of sins is thrown into 
the water.® 

1 Jastrow, Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, p. 292, 2 1b., 320. 

3 For the list of offences, see below. 


4 From the Incantation Table Surpu (burning) (Zimmern, Beitrdge, 


pp. 3-9). 
5 ib., Table IV. p. 23. 


ETHICAL CONCEPTIONS IN EARLY THOUGHT 448 


These incantation tablets of the Babylonians help us to 
understand the famous 125th chapter of the Egyptian Book of the 
_ Dead, by far the oldest representation of a Day of Judgment. 
If we look at this account carefully we shall see that here again 
it is not really a confession of sins, nor a plea for forgiveness, nor 
even in reality a self-justification that is in question. The dead 
man enumerates all possible sins that occur to the Egyptian mind 
as likely to anger the gods, and he rejects them in the appropriate 
language. Whether he was really and truly guilty of them 
seems to have been a secondary matter. The point is that he 
rids himself of them by repudiating them in the proper formule. 
In fact, the introduction to the confession explains that this 
‘shall be said ’? when the deceased “‘ cometh forth into the hall 
of Double Maati, so that he may be separated from every sin 
which he hath done.” The first thing that the deceased says to 
Osiris is, “‘ I know thee, and I know thy name, and I know the 
names of the two-and-forty gods . . . who live as wardens of 
sinners and who feed upon their blood.” Knowing the names 
of these cannibal spirits he has magic power over them, and he 
addresses each one in turn, repudiating the sins which put him 
in the power of each spirit. ‘“‘ Hail thou, whose strides are long, 
who comest forth from Annu, I have not done iniquity. Hail 
thou, who art embraced by flames, who comest forth from Kher- 
aha, 1 have not robbed with violence,’ +! and so on through a 
list of forty-two gods and forty-two sins. ‘The confession con- 
cluded, he again protests that he knows the names of the gods, 
he has “heard that mighty word which the spiritual bodies 
(v. 1. the Ass) spake unto the cat,”’ he has purified his breast, his 
hinder parts and his inner parts, and he opens the doors by telling 
their names.” At every turn magical lore holds the master- 

1 For the full list of sins, see below. 

2 Budge, Book of the Dead, vol. ii. pp. 355-877. In Egypt we can parti- 
ally trace the development by which the future life and the rule of the gods 
in general became associated with morality. The oldest tombs contain 
provision for the continuance of life, and this principle maintains itself 
against the doctrine of retribution to the end. With it as equally non- 
moral we may rank the mass of magical prescriptions which make up the 
bulk of the Book of the Dead. Now, in the Pyramid texts which are our 
main sources for the ideas of the Old Kingdom, rites and formule predomin- 
ate and ethical considerations “‘ play a very unimportant part ” (Gardiner, 
Enc. of Ethics, art. ‘‘ Ethics and Morality—Egyptian,”’ p. 476). Indeed, the 
kings boast of violence and adultery (Breasted, op. cit., p. 177). On the 
other hand, as Mr. Gardiner points out, the morality of kings is not always 
exactly that of lower people and the funeral stele of the officials always 
record their good deeds. ‘‘I gave bread to all the hungry . . . I clothed 
him who was naked . . . I never oppressed any one in possession of his 


property (27th century B.c.), and again: ‘‘ Never did I say aught evil to 
a powerful one against anybody. I desired that it might be well with me 


444 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


key, and the repudiation of sins is itself a magical formula for 
destroying them.! 

Where the religious element predominates wrong-doing is 
held to be an offence against a spirit. We have seen that it is 
still possible that the means of expiation should closely resemble 
those of magic. The spirit may be merely driven away, or 
frightened off, or got rid of by deception. But the commoner 
case, particularly as the spirit develops into a god, is to appease 
him by sacrifice. Just as the sacrifice may be offered to secure 
a boon, so it may be used to avert wrath, and as primitive 
sacrifice is held by many modern authorities to be primarily a 
means of communication between the worshipper and the deity, 
the piacular form would tend to grow as magical beliefs gave 
way to the divine governance of the world, and calamities were 
held to be the direct expression of divine wrath. At this point 
the value of the sacrifice became the essential feature, and men 
gave to the gods what they held most dear to themselves; hence 
costly hecatombs and human sacrifice.2 The eminently un- 





in the Great God’s presence ”’ (Breasted, pp. 168, 170, etc.). The founda- 
tion of these addresses was the desire to obtain mortuary offerings. But 
during the period of the Pyramid builders the notion of a judgment arising 
apparently from the myth of the trial of Osiris was beginning to make itself 
felt, and Mr. Breasted shows that a reference to the “‘ justification ”’ of a 
mortal was introduced in the later part of that period (p. 177). Between 
this time and the Middle Kingdom, or about 2000 B.c., the connection of 
Osiris with the dead was progressively strengthened and from this time 
every dead person is spoken of as “‘ justified ’’ (p. 256). Finally, we have 
the full judgment scenes (in which, however, the magical element is strongly 
maintained), dating in our earliest copies from the 18th Dynasty, though, 
of course, much older in its composition. - 

1 This interpretation of the Negative Confession is supported by the 
authority of Mr. Griffith (Stories of the High Priests of Memphis, p. 46). 
It was impossible, as Mr. Griffith points out, for a man to be innocent of 
all the sins, so exhaustively enumerated, but ‘‘ by denial of sin in correct 
terms, and by magic adjuration of the heart not to betray him in the scales, 
the deceased outwitted the gods,”’ and so the worst culprit could escape 
punishment. ‘Thus, on the one hand, the idea of punishment developed 
until it seemed that no salvation was possible for any one; on the other, 
‘*‘ purely mechanical means were provided, which, as it would seem, the 
greatest sinner could embrace with full assurance of bliss.” 

In a description of the Last Judgment found in the Tale of Khammas, 
dating from the first century after Christ, the evil deeds of a man are 
weighed against his good deeds. Here the magical element has receded in 
favour of the moral. 

* See Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, p. 394, etc. Of course, 
this is not the sole origin of human sacrifice, which is common enough from 
barbaric times in association with the cult of the dead, but in earlier 
civilizations it had a special tendency to crop out anew in connection with 
national calamities; e. g. among the Jews and occasionally at Rome. “A 
most unroman practice,” says Livy. Human sacrifice occurred in Greece 
“** sporadically ’’ throughout the historic period, but the balance of the 


ETHICAL CONCEPTIONS IN EARLY THOUGHT 445 


“spiritual conception of atoning for sin by these means is one 
of the points seized upon by the advance guard of spiritual 
religion. The Jahveh of the Prophets desired mercy and not 
sacrifice, and the cultivated Roman saw the folly and the moral 
levity of the belief that the guilt of blood could be washed away 
by water.1 

Upon the whole, then, in the earlier stages of moral develop- 
ment the mode of dealing with guilt consists either in putting 
it away or repudiating it by a magical process, or in appeasing 
or conciliating the gods whom it has offended. Neither of these 
methods can be regarded as ethical in themselves. They may 
incidentally involve elements of retributive justice, as where a 
penance is imposed as part of the means of purification, or a 
costly sacrifice is enjoined as necessary to buy off punishment. 
They may also, where confession is exacted, have recuperative 
moral effect. It is permissible to think that these ethical 
elements have not been without their influence in determining 
the form which expiation takes, and particularly in a religion 
like that of Mexico, where civilized elements rub shoulders with 
the most unspeakable barbarities, we seem to find the moral 
element coming into prominence. But speaking generally and 
looking at the principle of the thing, we find the ethical element 
but little developed on this side.. The removal of sin belongs 
either to the region of magical mechanism or of spiritual 
commerce. 


9. In the variety of customs and beliefs at which we have 
glanced we seem to recognize two fairly distinct stages of ethical 
development. In the lower, the force behind custom—apart, of 
course, from the physical restraints imposed by society itself—is 


evidence is strong against the belief that it was a real feature of the Attic 
Thargelia in the Periclean age. Though occasionally suggested it was 
clearly repugnant to the general feeling in the fifth and fourth centuries 
(Farnell, iv. 208 and 275 seq.). 

1 Professor Tylor (vol. ii. p. 439) quotes Ovid— 


** Ah, nimium faciles qui tristia crimina cedis 
Fluminea tolli posse putetis aqua.” 


In somewhat similar strain Horace— 


*‘TImmunis aram si tetigit manus 
Non sumptuosa blandior hostia 
Mollivit aversos Penates 
Farre pio et saliente mica.” 


Still more remarkable the epigrams ascribed to Delphi: “ Lustration 
is an easy matter for the good, but an evil man the whole of ocean cannot 
cleanse with its streams” (Farnell, p. 212, and cf. the doctrine of the 
widow’s mite, ib., 210). 


446 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


the fear of magical influences or of revengeful spirits. Neither 
of these is of essentially ethical character. The vengeance of a 
ghost is very different from the judgment of a god. It does not 
consider the rights and wrongs of the case, but acts, like the 
vengeance of the savage himself, on the principle of retaliation. 
The magical taboo may be held to embody what we call moral 
feelings, but it implies no clear recognition of the distinctive 
nature of morality. It does not necessarily apply to all wrong 
actions,! while it does apply to many acts that are innocent or 
are even deemed laudable,? as well as to numerous acts of no 
moral significance, and in all cases its action as conceived by the 
savage is what we should call mechanical rather than ethical. 
Thus the conceptions which serve as a basis for ethical conduct 
are themselves devoid of ethical character, and the means taken 
for averting the consequences of guilt, as purifications, incanta- 
tions, and the appeasement of offended spirits, are of the same 
nature. SA step in advance is taken when spiritual agencies 
arise who take interest in certain moral acts as such, protecting 
the helpless and suppliant because they are helpless or suppliant, 
and punishing the murderer because he is a murderer. In this 
way certain departments of action are marked out in which a 
distinctly religious sanction is found for certain rules of conduct, 
and this idea is generalized in proportion as the avenging deities 
become the ministers or possibly the attributes of some, or, it 
may be, of one of the greater gods, who thus comes to be an up- 
holder of the moral order asa whole. Sucha god will bea judge 
of men who rewards or punishes in accordance with an impartial 
law. Asa judge he differs materially from a vengeful spirit. 
Unfortunately, the conception of judgment is too often associated 
with means of appeasing the divine wrath in which very primitive 
and non-moral conceptions are wont to survive. If the belief 
in a future Judgment represents the ethical conception of retri- 
bution, means of securing a favourable judgment will very prob- 
ably be supplied by a special application of primitive magic. 
Bearing these limitations in mind, we may, nevertheless, recognize 
at this second stage a distinctly ethical element in the divinely 


1 ¢.g. Theft and adultery. Theft may, indeed, violate a taboo, but 
this is a penalty imposed by the self-interest of the owner. 

2 e.g. Involuntary homicide or the lawful slaying of an enemy. Here 
the distinction comes to a head. While the moral consciousness would 
allow contact with the dead to pollute only so far as guilt is marked, the 
genuine magical or animistic point of view is that the guilt (of homicide) 
pollutes only so far as dangerous contact with the dead is involved. The 
failure to differentiate the holy and unclean which has been noted above 
may be taken as typical of magical and animistic thought. 


ETHICAL CONCEPTIONS IN EARLY THOUGHT 447 


appointed sanctions on which the social order rests. Morality 
is based on a partially moralized religion. 

. We may fruitfully compare this advance with the development 
which we found in studying primitive justice. We there had 
evidence of a stage at which acts infringing the rights of others 
beyond a very narrow circle are not, strictly speaking, regarded 
as inherently wrong, but rather as legitimate occasions for 
vengeance to be inflicted by the sufferer and his kinsfolk if strong 
enough to do so. It is not my right to my property which is 
sacred at this stage, but rather my right to the protection of my 
‘kindred. The personal rights and duties which constitute the 
elements of social order are not yet regarded as valuable in them- 
selves and deserving of the general support of impartial persons. 
The main categorical imperative is “‘ Stand by thy kin.” Doubt- 
less the organization of the blood feud tends on the whole to the 
‘Maintenance of a certain order, and thus indirectly the elements 
of social order are protected by this same ‘‘imperative.” But 
this does not amount to a direct recognition of the primary 
rights of person and property. Putting these facts together and 
taking them in connection with what we now see of the basis of 
‘morality, we may infer that moral feeling is not at this stage 
disengaged on the one hand from the sentiments making for the 
solidarity of a little group, nor on the other from a prudential 
dread of human vengeance or of mysterious forces in which there 
is nothing peculiarly moral. Nor, conversely, do the mass of 
feelings which surround and sanctify custom directly support 
those rights and duties in which, to our thinking, the elements 
of the moral order consist, but rather that mutual aid among 
kinsfolk by which, as chance directs, the moral order may be 
supported or may be overridden. Above the stage of the blood 
feud we saw the rise of public justice and the growing predomin- 
ance of the view that breaches of the social order are wrongs to 
be punished rather than personal injuries to be avenged. We 
saw how society became directly interested in maintaining the 
elements of social peace, and safeguarding the primary rights of 
person and property for members of its body, so that as far as 
the social tie extends the simple social obligations are recognized 
as binding.t We seem to see here the emergence of a more 





1 In a sense the wider society thus attains the “solidarity ’’ which the 
primary group reached at a lower stage. But to represent the whole pro- 
cess as a simple widening of group morality by an extension of the social 
unit would not do justice to the change involved. Within the enlarged 
family or any group of similar dimensions every relation is personal, and 
the dependence of each on the protection of the whole is direct and present 


448 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


distinctly ethical consciousness which corresponds with, and in 
fact often finds embodiment in, the higher and clearer conceptions 
of distinct superhuman personalities who judge impartially 
between good and evil. In this conception, however crudely 
and indistinctly worked out, the “ethical basis’ is no longer 
wholly “‘unethical.’? Not indeed in the form of a coherent ideal, 
or a reasoned truth, but as a working rule ordained by a just God 
the ethical begins to make itself felt as a distinct element of the 
human consciousness. This emergence constitutes the first step 
onwards in ethical evolution. 

The same development may be described from a converse 
point of view by altering the question, and instead of inquiring 
into the basis of early morality, asking what is the ethical char- 
acter of early religion. The reply will be that in the first stage 
we find that spirits, as such, are not concerned with morality, 
though some spirits by their position may be affected by certain 
kinds of conduct which they may resent. In the second stage 
we find spirits! whose essential function is to preside over certain 
branches of the law, and as development proceeds they become 
servants of gods, who supervise morals generally. Yet even at 
this stage, gods are not always, or necessarily, perfect beings ; 
if there are some who represent physical and moral ideals, there 
are others who exhibit not only the evil passions of contemporary 
men, but sometimes also the darkest practices of primitive 
humanity which their own worshippers have outgrown. Some 
gods are good, but goodness is not yet the essential attribute of 
God. 


to the mind. When several such groups form one society, the first result 
is the practice of collective self-redress. When this is overcome it is by the 
imstitution of an impersonal justice, that is precisely one which disregards 
personal ties, and the wider society so established has a unity which differs 
from group solidarity because it ceases to be directly and obviously true 
that its members stand and fall together. Within it great divergences of 
interest appear, both between individuals and groups, and the unity which 
imposes restraints upon these interests is one that has to overcome the 
solidarity of the group. It is not till the impersonal justice which is the 
basis of this order has been established that we can say with certainty that 
the ethical judgment has achieved distinctness from the impulses and 
feelings which brought it to birth, and begun the work of framing an order 
in which feeling is to be subordinate. Of course, as long as any of the 
unreal distinctions of group morality remain this order is not complete, but 
it is not till impartial justice passes the limits of the primary group that 
it can be said with certainty to have begun. 

1 In themselves these spirits, whether idealized ghosts or personified 
functions like Fides, are rather a special development of animism than 
members of the circle of the gods. But though not at first identical with 
the gods, they are a collateral product of growing religious thought, and in 
fact tend, as we have seen, to fuse with them. 


ETHICAL CONCEPTIONS IN EARLY THOUGHT 449 


_ 10. In these early stages the ethical consciousness is still 
struggling for distinct recognition. It is far as yet from the 
position in which it can dominate the customary code or infuse 
its own ideal into the mass of social tradition. The morals of 
early society are therefore still governed by the conditions under 
which social life has arisen—that is to say, in particular by the 
principles of group-morality, in which the elements of hatred 
and revenge, of self-assertion and domination—in a word, of all 
the qualities that make for success in strife, are at least as 
prominent as the principles of love, sympathy, forgiveness, 
harmonious co-operation, which make directly for the peaceable © 
life of an ordered society. Early society, we might say, is 
founded on the two complementary principles of attraction and 
repulsion, and both are represented in its codes. True, early 
societies differ greatly in character, and we have noted instances 
in which, whether owing to fortunate surroundings or to a happy 
strain of moral inheritance, a simple, primitive life is lived in 
almost idyllic peace and harmony. But these are rare, and 
such a character is hardly at this stage to be found among the 
peoples which make the deepest mark upon the world. The 
condition of a low general culture favours rather the tribes 
which allow a large sphere of operation to the military instincts. 
Especially in the races which are starting on a great career of 
influence in the civilized world the blend of militant and domestic 
virtues is conspicuous, and the type that results, familiar to us 
from the annals of early Greece and Rome, from Hebrew history, 
and the accounts of primitive German life, is in many respects 
admirable. The closely knit patriarchal family, the loyalty to 
the chief, the mutual help of the kinsfolk, the respect for woman 
qualifying the inferiority of her legal status, the sanctity of the 
oath, the open-handed hospitality, the regard for the suppliant 
and the stranger—these are among the virtues of primitive 
society to which its descendants sometimes look back with regret 
for their relative decline under the softening influences of culture. 
The other side of the account is the comparative moral isolation 
of each society, the ferocity often shown to enemies, the dis- 
regard of-human rights where not protected by equal membership 
of the social group, the permission of piracy and slave-dealing, 
the frequent appearance of barbarous religious rites. 


11. In the early Oriental civilizations there is a certain blunting 
of the edges of the barbarian ideals. Though war and conquest, 
slave-dealing and the imposition of tribute, play a large part in 
national life and political history, private ethics are more con- 

GG 


450 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


cerned with quiet industrial life and the arts of peace. Political 
freedom is gone: the personal power of the chief or the great 
warrior counts for less; the family pride of powerful groups of 
kinsfolk is lowered. The ethical codes reflect a softening of 
manners along with a certain loss of the elements of chivalrous 
idealism which mark the best of the barbarian world, and which 
are not yet replaced by the idealism of religion or of humanity. 
It happens that both from ancient Babylonia and Egypt we have 
remarkably full statements of what were doubtless recognized 
as the principal moral obligations in the documents already 
mentioned—the Babylonian Incantation tablets and the Egyptian 
Book of the Dead. 

In the second of the Shurpu Incantation Tablets,1 already 
referred to, the exorcist asks on behalf of his victim— 


‘“‘ Has he offended his god . . . offended his goddess ? 
Has he uttered calamitous things ? 
Has he said evil things ? 
Has he said impure things ? 
Has he allowed unjust things to be said ? 
Has he made a judge take a bribe ? 
Has he oppressed weakness ? 
Has he divided father and son ? 
Has he divided son and father ? 
Has he divided mother and daughter ? 
Has he divided daughter and mother ? ”’ 


And so for several pairs of relations. 
““ Has he not set the captive free? . . . loosed the bonds of the 


fettered ? 

Denied a prisoner the light of day ? 

Said of a captive ‘Seize him’ . . . of one who is bound, ‘ Bind 
him ’ 2 

Is there any sin against a god . . . any trespass against a 
goddess ? 

Any violence towards his forbears . . . any hatred towards his 
elder brother ? 

Has he scorned father and mother . . . affronted his elder 
sister ? 

Has he given in small things . . . denied in great things ? 


Has he said ‘ yes’ for ‘no’? 


1 Zimmern (Delitzsch u. Haupt, Bibliothek.), Beitrége zur Kenniniss 
der Babylonischen Religion, 1901, p. 3, Tables II., III., VIII. Owing to 
their magical character, as explained above, the tablets are full of repeti- 
tions, sometimes with slight differences of phraseology, but the list given in 
the text covers, I believe, all the distinct causes of offence enumerated. I 
have let a few repetitions stand by way of illustration. 


| 


_ ETHICAL CONCEPTIONS IN EARLY THOUGHT 451 


. “No’ for ‘ yes’? 
_ Has he used false weights ? 


Has he taken bad money . . . not taken good money ? 
_ Disinherited a legitimate son . . . put in an illegitimate son ? 
Made false boundaries . . . not allowed true boundaries. 


Displaced boundary, landmark, limit ? 
Has he set foot in his neighbour’s house ? 
Approached his neighbour’s wife, 
Shed his neighbour’s blood, 
Stolen his neighbour’s dress ? 
Has he not let a man go out of his power ? 
Driven a respectable man out of his family, 
_ Divided a united kindred, 
Raised himself against his superior ? 
Was he sincere with his lips . . . false in his heart, 
Saying ‘yes’ with his lips . . . ‘no’ with his heart ? 
Is it for all unrighteousness that he meditated, 
To persecute the righteous, to repudiate, 
To annihilate, to drive away, to destroy, 
To raise up—to stir up violence, 
To outrage, to rob, to procure robbery, 
_ To engage in evil ? 
Is his mouth loose and obscene, 
(Are) his lips deceitful and refractory ? 
Has he committed an impurity . . . taught indecent things ? 
Has he engaged in magic and witchcraft ? 
Has he made a promise with heart and lips, but not kept it, 
Through a present dishonoured the name of his god, 
Consecrated and vowed something, but kept it back, 
Presented something . . . but eaten it ? 
Has he angered his god and goddess against him ? ”’ 
* Whether he has pointed to a figure with his finger ? 
Whether through the figure of his father or mother . . . he is 
cursed, 
Through the figure of his elder brother or elder sister . . . he is 
cursed, etc.” 
“Whether he has wrought wickedness to his town, 
_ Spread a report about his town, 
Maligned the fair name of his town ? 
Whether he has approached an accursed one, 
Whether an accursed one has approached him, 
Whether he has slept in an accursed one’s bed, 
Sat on the accursed one’s chair... 
He demands, he demands ’— 


The list may be completed from the remaining tables. Thus 
Table III. mentions— 





452 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


‘* A curse through pointing with the finger at fire, 
Through taking fire and swearing by god, 
Through demanding due instead of giving it, 
Through sitting facing the sun, 
Through tearing up plants from the field, 
Through bow, brazen dagger, or spear, 
Through slaying young game, 
Through stealing up to a companion and slaying him, 
Through being besought for a day about a gutter and refusing 
Through being besought for a day about a cistern and refusing, 
Through taking a bucket and swearing by god, 
Through asking any one about hunting, in the stable, 
Through swearing by god with unwashed hands upheld, 
Through stopping a neighbour’s canal, 
Instead of being compliant to an opponent, remaining inimical | 

to him, 

Through producing a weapon in an assembly, 
Through interceding for a sinner.” 


Further, in Table IV. we find a curse through 


‘“‘ Abandoning instead of protecting manservant, maidservant, 
master or mistress, 
Abandoning instead of protecting woman, wife or son.” 


The list of possible offences would doubtless tend to grow as 
fresh possibilities of offences occurred, while people were afraid of 
leaving out anything for fear of losing the magical effect. As 
to the contents of the code, it will be seen that the simple ethical 
duties, respect for life, property, and sex, all figure; that great 
stress is laid upon the family tie and upon disturbances of the 
peace among relations and friends, that violence is deprecated, 
and that at least in one place, if not forgiveness of enemies, at 
any rate reconciliation with enemies seems to be recommended. 
Finally, the duties to prisoners and captives, the obligation to 
protect the slave and the dependent are freely recognized. In 
mentioning these points, however, we have indicated the highest 
limit which the code touches. 

With the Babylonian tablets we may compare the well-known 
chap. exxv. of the Book of the Dead1 There are two Confessions. 
The first runs as follows— 


1 Translations of this chapter vary greatly. In the text I have followed 
that of Mr. Ll. Griffith, World’s Interature, p. 5320. The variants in 
brackets are from Mr. Gardiner’s article in the Enc. Religion and Ethics. 
The concluding address to the gods is from Dr. Budge’s translation in the 
Book of the Dead. In view of the variations of reading the details cannot 
be pressed. Yet inspite of the unethical treatment it is difficult to suppose 
that any offences considered deadly would be omitted. 


ETHICAL CONCEPTIONS IN EARLY THOUGHT 453 


I have not done injury to men. 

I have not oppressed those beneath me (brought misery upon 
my fellows). 

I have not acted perversely [prevaricated ?] instead of straight- 
forwardly (wrought injuries in the place of right). 

I have not known vanity (known what is not). 

I have not been a doer of mischief. 

(L have not made the beginning of every day laborious in the 
sight of him who worked for me.) 

(My name has not approached the ship of him who is first.) 

(I have not slighted (?) God.) 

(I have not impoverished the poor.) 

I have not done what the gods abominate. 

I have not turned the servant against his master (traduced 
the slave to him who is set over him), 

I have not caused hunger. 

I have not caused weeping. 

I have not murdered. 

t have not commanded murder. 

I have not caused suffering to men (made every one suffer). 

I have not cut short the rations of the temple. 

I have not diminished the offerings of the gods. 

I have not taken the provisions of the blessed dead. 

ft have not committed fornication, nor impurity in what was 
sacred to the god of my city. (In the service of the god 
of my city.) 

I have not added to, nor diminished the measures of grain. 

I have not diminished the palm measure. 

I have not falsified the cubit of land (added to nor filched away). 

I have not added to the weights of the balance. 

I have not nullified the plummet of the scales. 

I have not taken milk from the mouth of babes. 

I have not driven cattle from their herbage. 

I have not trapped birds, the bones of the gods. 

I have not caught fish in their pools (). 

I have not stopped water in its season. 

I have not dammed running water. 

{ have not quenched fire when burning. (In its [appointed] 
time. 

I have sth disturbed the cycle of gods, when at their choice 
meats (neglected the feast days in respect of their sacri- 
ficial joints). 

I have not driven off the cattle of the sacred estate. 
I have not stopped a god in his comings forth. 
(Iam pure. Iam pure. I am pure.)”! 


1 Griffith, World’s Literature, 5320. 


454 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


After an adjuration to the gods, the Second Confession 
follows— 


“‘T have not done injustice (wickedness). 

I have not robbed. 

I have not coveted (?) (been grasping 2). 

I have not stolen. 

T have not slain men. 

I have not diminished the corn measure. 

I have not acted crookedly. 

I have not stolen the property of the gods. 

I have not spoken falsehood. 

I have not taken food away. 

T have not been lazy (?) (I have not been resentful 2). 

I have not trespassed (been neglectful). 

I have not slain a sacred animal. 

I have not been niggardly in grain (robbed the loaves). 

T have not stolen. 

I have not been a pilferer (an eavesdropper). 

My mouth hath not run on (have not been a gossip). 

I have not been a tale-bearer (made mischief) in business not 
mine own. 

I have not committed adultery with another man’s wife. 

I have not been impure. 

I have not made disturbance. 

I have not transgressed (laid schemes). 

My mouth has not been hot. 

I have not been deaf to the words of truth. 

I have not made confusion. 

I have not caused weeping. 

I am not given to unnatural lust. (I have not... the 
copulator who was copulating.) 

I have not borne a grudge (made suppressions). 

I have not quarrelled (reviled). 

I am not of aggressive hand (have not been violent). 

I am not of inconstant mind (hasty). 

I have not spoiled the colour of him who washes his god (}) 
(neglected the nature of the god’s satisfaction). 

My voice has not been too voluble in my speech. 

I have not deceived nor done ill (done harm to the doer of 
evil). ' 

I have not cursed the king. 

I have not waded over the water. 

My voice is not loud (haughty). 

I have not cursed God. 

I have not made bubbles (?) (been puffed up). 

I have not made (unjust) preferences (comparisons with myself). 


ETHICAL CONCEPTIONS IN EARLY THOUGHT 455 


I have not acted the rich man except in my own things (made 
a show with possessions not my own). 
I have not offended the god of my city (thought scorn of).” ! 


Then follows a further adjuration.? 


“Homage to you, O ye gods who dwell in your Hall of double 
Maati, I, even I, know you, and I know your names... I have 
not cursed God, and let not evil hap come upon me through the 
king who dwelleth in my day%. . . I have performed the com- 
mandments of men (as well as) the things whereat are gratified 
the gods . . . I have given bread to the hungry man, and water 
to the thirsty man, and apparel to the naked man, and a boat 
to the (shipwrecked) mariner. I have made holy offerings to 
the gods, and sepulchral meals to the khus. Be ye then my 
deliverers.”’ 


Not only are homicide, violence, many forms of dishonesty 
and sexual impurity* here repudiated, but, what is perhaps most 
remarkable, there appears a strong implied condemnation of 
any conduct causing suffering to others,® a recognition of duty 
_to dependents, and a claim to the merit of positive beneficence. 
_ There is also a noteworthy repudiation of undue self-seeking, and 
in one place something like an insistence on forgiveness. 

The skeleton of this Negative Confession is filled in for us 
by such moralistic writings as the Precepts of Ptah-Hotep, the 
Instructions for King Mery-ke-re, and the tale of the Eloquent 
Peasant, etc., dating from the Middle Kingdom, and the Maxims 
of Ani belonging tothe new Kingdom. Full of platitudes as these 
seem to the modern reader wherever their meaning is not obscure, 
they appear to have had a long popularity in ancient Kgypt, 
and they are of historic interest as perhaps the earliest examples 
of secular ethics, the morals of worldly wisdom with little or 
no reference to religious sanctions; indeed, occasionally with 
a certain suggestion in them that this life is all we have and 


1 Griffith, World’s Literature, 5321. 

2 Budge, Book of the Dead, ii. 371. 

8 Or, “ I have had no fault towards the king of my time ”’ (Gardiner). 

4 The references to impurity are not free from ambiguity. Professoi 
Flinders Petrie (Religion and Conscience, p. 134) regards the repudiation in 
the First Confession (which he considers to be the oldest) as dealing only 
with a violation of the sacred precinct, while in the Second Confession he 
distinguishes three repudiations of adultery (19), of impurity (20), and 
unnatural lust (27). Max Miller, however (Liebespoesie, p. 17), understands 
the reference to impurity as a repudiation of the use of love philters. On 
the whole, it seems unlikely that fornication as such is one of the forty-two 
sins (cf. Gardiner, Enc. Ethics, p. 482). 

5 The references to animals are obscure and can hardly be pressed. They 
seem to have magical or religious rather than a humanitarian purport. 


456 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


we had best make the most of it. The tendency of both Ptah- 
Hotep and Ani is to recommend a certain mildness and modera- | 
tion of temper, restraint in language and in social intercourse, 
prudence and energy in the conduct of one’s own affairs, a 
strenuous minding of one’s own business and avoidance of gossip, 
a prudent bending to superiors and an equally wise moderation 
in dealing with those of lower estate, a generally diffused good- 
nature and reasonableness—all as means whereby man prospers 
in this world and, perhaps, in the Valley of the Dead as well. 
“It is the modest (?) that obtain wealth; never did the greedy 
(?) arrive at their aim,” says the optimistic Ptah-Hotep. ‘ Make 
not terror among men.t God punisheth the like... Never 
did violence among men succeed.” ? Again, “ Beware of any 
covetous aim. That is as the painful disease of colic. He 
who entereth on it is not successful. It embroileth fathers 
and mothers with the mother’s brothers, it separateth wife and 
husband ... A man liveth long whose rule is justice.’ In the 
same spirit the pupil is to keep from relations with the women 
in the house which he enters, but be kind to a woman if he has 
made her ashamed. He should avoid scandal and gossip.4 He 
should prefer gentle to violent methods. ‘“‘ Greater is the prayer 
to a kindly person than force.’’® He should avoid presumption, — 
‘Raise not thy heart lest it be cast down.” ® If successful he 
should avoid niggardliness. If a chief or great officer, he should 
do justice, and be considerate and attentive to suitors. If an 
inferior, “‘ Bend thy back to thy chief, thy superior of the king’s 
house, on whose property thy house dependeth . . . it is ill to be 
at variance with the chief. One liveth only while he is gracious.”’? 
But to friends, “ Let thy face be shining the time that thou 
hast . . . The remembrance of a man is of his kindliness in the 
years after the staff (of power ?).”’® Or as Ani puts it, “ Kat 
not bread while another standeth by . . . The one is rich and the 
other poor, and bread remaineth to him who is open-handed. 
He who was prosperous last year even in this may be a vagrant.’”® 


1 This is taken by Mr. Griffith (World’s Literature, 5332) as referrmg to 
the occupations of brigandage and pillage. It is rather a faint condem- 
nation. Others understand it as a counsel against associating with the 
slave of another. 

Ptah-Hotep, sec. 6. Tr. Griffith, World’s Literature, 5332. 
2b., sec. 19. 

Flinders Petrie, Religion and Conscience, 117 = Ani, sec. 16. 
ab., 155 = Ptah-Hotep, sec. 20 

ab., 143 = Ptah-Hotep, sec. 25. 

ab., 150, 154 = Ptah-Hotep, 30, 31. 

7b., 141, 143 = Ptah-Hotep, 34. 

1b., 154 = Ani, 41; Griffith, World’s Literature, 5341. 


©eOexn aan Pe WO bh 


ETHICAL CONCEPTIONS IN EARLY THOUGHT 4657 


By attending to Ani’s maxims you will reach an honoured old age, 
and. be ready for death however suddenly it comes. 

_ There is much of kindliness, much of social good-nature, much 
of prudent moderation, something of self-reliance and dignity, 
but “there is hardly a single splendid feeling; there is not one 
burst of magnanimous sacrifice; there is not one heartfelt self- 
depreciation in any point of all that worldly wisdom.’ ? 

A somewhat higher note is struck in such literary pieces of the 
Middle Kingdom as the ‘‘ Eloquent Peasant.” This is in 
effect a bitter satire on the indifference of official justice and a 
‘sustained plea for redress running the whole gamut from lauda- 
tion of the judge as the implement of eternal justice to the 
threat of suicide and appeal to the lord of the dead if retribution 
is withheld. 


“Do justice for the sake of the lord of justice . . . for justice 
(or righteousness, right, truth °) is for eternity. It descends with 
him that doeth it into the grave .. . His name is not effaced on 
earth, he is remembered because of good. Such is the exact 
summation of the divine word.”’ 4 


The peasant has been compared to a Hebrew prophet, and 
in the passion of his denunciation he is their forerunner. But it 
is hardly correct to speak of him as a pleader for social justice. 
It is judicial indifference that he is satirizing, not the subtler 
and more far-reaching forms of social wrong.> He reflects the 
same feeling for legal uprightness which invented or cherished the 
tradition of a judge of the Old Kingdom who always gave deci- 
sions against any member of his own family for fear of seeming 
partiality, and the higher view of the Middle Kingdom which 
rebuked such discrimination : ‘“‘ Now this is more than justice.” ® 
We see, however, in these writings a more genuine association of 
religion with ethics than that of the Hall of Osiris, and we find 
traces of the same advance in the Instructions for King Mery- 
ke-re which have already been quoted for their incipient mono- 
theism. ‘‘ How hath he (Re) slain the froward of heart ? Even 
as a man smiteth his son for his brother’s sake. For God knows 


1 Flinders Petrie, 129 = Ani, 15. 

2 2b., 162: 

8 Gardiner’s rendering is Wahrheit (Die Klage des Bauern, p. 14). 

4 Breasted, p. 224; Gardiner, loc. cit. 

5 The complaints of Ipnever (Gardiner, Admonitions of an Egyptian 
Sage ; Breasted, p. 204, etc.) may refer to a real state of social anarchy but 
are rather like the grumbling of some one who has had misfortunes against 
the nouveaux riches. The burden of the complaint is that he who was 
a serf now has serfs, while the well-to-do man is hungry. 

$ Breasted, 242. 


458 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


every name.” “‘ More acceptable is the nature of one just of 
heart than the ox of him who doeth iniquity ’’4—a really notable 
anticipation of ‘‘ I will have mercy and not sacrifice.”’ So, too, 
earlier in the document we read: “ Do justice that thou mayst 
endure upon earth. Calm the weeper. Oppress not the widow.” 
But a terrible bathos follows: “Slaughter not, for it does 
not profit thee,” or, perhaps, “unless it profit thee.” Such a 
transition warns us against large conclusions from exceptional 
traces of idealism. On the whole, as the Egyptian religion was 
pre-spiritual, so Egyptian morality was that of common-sense 
moderation. Idealism exists only in a few germs. 

The chivalry of barbarism is gone, and the idealisms of religion 
and of humanity have not yet come. ‘To the rise of such idealism 
we must now turn. 


1 Gardiner, Journ. Eg. Arch., Jan. 1914, p. 34. 


CHAPTER III 
THE WORLD AND THE SPIRIT 


1. THE growth of reflection has in many races and under 
divers conditions of culture carried mankind beyond the stage 
of Polytheism. The awakening reason demands a theory of the 
universe and ceases to be satisfied with the patchwork schemes 
of mythology. The moral self coming to partial consciousness 
of its nature and scope demands a higher rule of life and a 
deeper understanding of its relation to cosmic forces. Instead 
of inventing stories about the beginning of things and the origin 
of laws, the mind begins to search for the general truths under- 
lying or permeating experience and giving unity and meaning 
to human purposes. The forward step achieved by thought in 
this movement may be described by saying that the imagery 
of its earlier stage is replaced by defined and reasoned con- 
ceptions formed by the analysis and reconstruction of primi- 
tive ideas. Though first applied with positive success in the 
special sciences, and particularly in the sciences of number 
and quantity, the ambition of conceptual thought is always to 
frame a theory of the universe and an ideal of life and character. 
And fail as it may-inits attemptsat-final truth, a deeper religion 


and a highe ics are the outcome of each-new effort. 
e lines on which these efforts proceed are very various. 


We have already seen the beginnings of a tendency to trace 
the scheme of things to a single principle, or at any rate to a 
first cause, in the attempts of polytheism to treat the many gods 
as different incarnations or emanations of one and the same 
- Being. But this tendency does not always lead to monotheism. 
On the contrary, great religious systems have arisen in which, 
as in Brahmanism, the movement is rather towards pantheism 
than to monotheism, and the unity of God is an uncertain con- 
ception waveringly held and admitting of compromise with the 
polytheistic traditions. There are religions like Buddhism, again, 
in which the whole theological aspect of religion is secondary, and 
the central conception is that of a necessary law of cosmic life 
by which human life in particular is determined and to which 
human beings must adjust themselves. Or finally, as in Taoism, 
459 





460 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


the supreme principle of things may be left undefined as some- 
thing that we experience in ourselves if we throw ourselves 
upon it, but which we know rather by following or living in it. 
than by any process of ratiocination. This mystical interpreta- 
tion is not confined to Taoism, but in one form or another lies 
near at hand to all spiritual religions, and expresses one mode 
of the religious consciousness, its aspiration to reach the heart of 
things and its confidence that it has done so and found rest 
there. 

Widely as these forms of religion differ from monotheism, 
they may for certain purposes be grouped along with it. All 
are or are on the way to become spiritual religions, resting on 
and involving a certain ethical idealism, and that power of 
handling conceptions which we take to imply a distinct stage 
onward in the growth of thought. for in the spiritual religions 
there is an endeavour to render an articulate account of the 
universe, of the world process as a whole, of man’s place therein 
and the duties which it imposes on him. But this attempt 
cannot even be entered upon seriously until certain fundamental 
conceptions are formed with tolerable distinctness. The con- 
trasts of the permanent and the changing, of substance and 
attributes, of cause and accident, of reality and appearance, 
of the eternal and the transitory, of the universal and the 
individual, of divine and human personality—such antitheses 
present themselves with greater or less articulateness in all 
attempts to think out the problem of the universe. What is 
common to all products of this stage of thought, and what 
differentiates them from the work of lower stages, is that in 
these the fundamental conceptions involved in any attempt to 
render the whole scheme of things in systematic fashion have 
definitely been brought into consciousness. The religions of 
this stage are all conceptual religions rising above mere imagery, 
and handling, as distinct objects of thought, categories which at 
a lower stage are still wrapped up in the experiences in which 
they are given to the senses.} 


1 The emergence of these fundamental conceptions into clear conscious- 
ness is to be regarded as the result of a long process of development. In 
chap. i. we traced the growth of the mind to the point at which concrete 
images or picture ideas could be distinctly formed and held apart. But 
such ideas are not yet fitted for systematic thinking. They have to be 
further broken up and re-combined, so as, in the first place, to become 
exact, and applied always with the same meaning (as “ universal ”’ instead 
of “general’’). Next, the elements that lie within an idea or go to 
constitute its character must be distinguishable, so that the differences 
which constitute a specific development of a general rule, or the blended 
identities and differences which constitute co-ordinate genera can be 


THE WORLD AND THE SPIRIT 461 


They are also spiritual religions, having at their best certain 
ethical conceptions in common. We have seen that the 
_ characteristic of the lowest religions is that their “spirits” are 
“unspiritual.” They are not even differentiated from matter. 
They blur and confound the distinction of good and evil, holy 
and unclean, intelligent purpose and mechanical action. In the 
stage now reached these confusions are in large measure over- 
come. The spiritual draws itself together and is presented in 
antithesis to the sensual and the earthly as the source of all 
light within man and without. The spiritual is opposed to the 
sensible world, the spirit in man_to_his-grosser elements, as the 
| Shactioiig muting of what is good and wise and beautiful, and 
as the bond that connects him with the sources of all that he 
finds of goodness and wisdom and beauty in the order of things. 
Finally, with this conception of spirituality a distinct set of 
ethical conceptions is connected. The individual must enter 
into relations with the universal spirit, and to do so he must 
put off his individuality. He must subdue the senses, and not 
only the senses, but all things that make for his own self-asser- 
_ tion and hinder his perfect communion with the spiritual world. 
_ Pride must give place to humility, resentment to forgiveness, 
the narrow love of kinship to universal benevolence, family 
life to the selfless impersonal brotherhood of monasticism. 
For the spirit is not yet of this world. The first step towards 
realizing itis to conceive it by contrast to common workaday 
experiences. ‘To understand how it may transform experience, 
to bring it back to earth without losing its warmth and glow 
upon the downward journey, is the unfulfilled task of a higher 
mode of thought. 


2. The spiritual religions have their home in the East. Pro- 
bably the earliest in point of time—though dates are very 
uncertain —is the imperfectly spiritualized system of the 
Brahmans. It is impossible, however, even to touch upon 
Brahmanism without saying one word upon the preceding stages 





assigned. When this is done the idea is transformed into the concept, and 
the loose thought-transitions by which images suggest one another are 
superseded by systematic meditation, reasoning and discussion, whereby 
concepts are analyzed or combined and consequences logically inferred 
from premises. Fallacious and genuine methods are distinguished, and 
thus the old confusion of idea and fact which made the world of make- 
believe is in principle overcome. On the other hand, in the early stages, 
the methods of testing the original value of the conceptions employed by 
a@ scientific analysis of experience is little understood, and there is accord- 
ingly a tendency to construct thought-fabrics which nowhere touch solid 
earth. 


462 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


of Hindu thought. The earliest phase of Hindu culture known 
to us, that of the Vedas, resembles in essentials the culture of 
the Homeric age, and, generally speaking, it has all the charac- 


teristics of a barbaric society, which is destined to develop into > 


something higher. Family life is in the patriarchal stage; the 
father is master of wife, children and slaves. ‘There is no caste 
as yet,! but there is a strong distinction between the fair- 
skinned conquering Aryans and the subject dark-skinned Dasyus. 
The gods of the Vedas are great gods, controlling the forces of 
nature, who may rank with any of the leading deities of Poly- 
theism. Indra is a man of war like Jahveh or Ashur. He is 
the special protector of the Arya—** wielding the thunderbolt, and 
confident in his prowess he strode onwards, shattering the cities 
of the Dasyus .. . chastising the lawless he subjected the 
black skin to Manu” (the white Aryan).? Neither the power 
nor the moral attributes of the deity are conceived with more 
consistency or clearness than in other polytheistic schemes. 
Indra is said to have created or lighted up Ushas. But in 
other hymns he crushes her chariot with his thunderbolt, and 
this smiting of ‘“‘a woman who was bent on evil ’’—elsewhere 
the recipient of prayer—is extolled as a “‘deed of might and 
manliness.”’*? Even in the Mahabharata and the Puranas, 
“Indra, Varuna and other gods” are represented “‘as leading 
a sensual and immoral life,” and “‘the Apsarases or celestial 
nymphs are expressly declared to be courtesans . .. and are 
represented as being sent by the gods from time to time to 
seduce austere sages into unchastity.’* S’ri is described as 
issuing forth from Prajapati. ‘‘ Beholding her thus standing 
resplendent and trembling, the gods were covetous of her and 
proposed to Prajapati that they should be allowed to kill her 
and appropriate her gifts ’”’—a genuine magical conception of 
the transference of powers. “‘ He replied that she was a female 
and that males did not generally kill females. They should, 
therefore, take from her her gifts without depriving her of life.’’® 
The chivalry of the gods did not go beyond respect for life, it 
appears. The gods, it is true, release from sin, but sin appears 
to be conceived as a quasi-magical bond, and the sin of the 
father is regularly visited on the children.6 Virtues, however, 


1 See above, Part i. chap. vii. 2 Muir, Sanskrit Texts, vol. v. p. 113. 
3 4b., vol. v. p. 192. 
* 2b., pp. 323, 324; cf. also p. 115. 5 2b., p. 349. 


6 See Max Miiller, Rig Veda, i. 244, 245, etc.: “‘ Absolve us from the 
sins of our fathers and from those which we have committed with our 
own bodies. Release Vasishtha, O king, like a thief who has feasted on 
stolen cattle; release him like a calf from the rope.” Cf. also Rig Veda, 


i THE WORLD AND THE SPIRIT 463 


‘recommend men to the gods, and especially liberality conduces 
to prosperity. “ He is the bountiful man who gives to the lean 
beggar who comes to him craving food. Success attends that 
man in the sacrifice and he secures for himself a friend in the 
tuture.”1 The conception of the divine power fluctuates no 
less than in other polytheistic religions. On the one side, it 
tends towards monotheism in the form of attributing supreme 
position to whichever deity is the immediate object of worship— 
Indra, Varuna, or another. At times with less of naiveté and 
more of deliberate pantheistic feeling, we find it laid down that 
one god is or includes all the rest. “‘ Aditi is the sky, Aditi is 
the air, Aditi is the mother and father and son, Aditi is all the 
gods and the five classes of men. Aditi is whatever has been 
born, Aditi is whatever shall be born.’ We even get a distinct 
attempt at a true speculative account of the beginning of things. 


' “There was then neither nonentity nor entity; there was no 
atmosphere, nor sky above. Whatenveloped (all)? Where, in 
the receptacle of what (wasit contained)? Wasit water, the pro- 
found abyss? Death was not then, nor immortality; there was 
no distinction of day or night. That One breathed calmly, self- 
supported; there was nothing different from, or above, it. Inthe 
‘beginning, darkness existed, enveloped in darkness. All this 
Was undistinguishable water. ... From what this creation 
arose, and whether (any one) made it or not,—he who in the 


vii. 86, quoted in Muir, p. 66, where the poet naively explains, “ It was 
not our will, Varuna, but some seduction which led us astray—wine, 
anger, dice, or thoughtlessness. The stronger perverts the weaker. Even 
sleep occasions sin.”’ 

1 Rig Veda, x. 117, quoted in Muir, pp. 431, 432. The notion of future 
reward appears in the Veda alongside of a more primitive view. He who 
cooks the vishtarin oblation “‘ goes to the gods, and lives in blessedness 
with the Gandharvas, the quaffers of soma. Yama does not steal away the 
generative power of those who cook the vishtarin oblation”’ (7b., p. 308). 
Here the question of oblations is most prominent. Elsewhere we read of 
heroic deeds, austerities and sage meditations, as contributing to bliss. 

** Let him (the deceased) depart to those for whom the honied beverage 
flows. Let him depart to those who, through rigorous abstraction, are 
invincible, who, through tapas, have gone to heaven; to those who have 
performed great tapas. Let him depart to the combatants in battles, to 
the heroes who have there sacrificed their lives, or to those who have 
bestowed thousands of largesses. Let him depart, Yama, to those austere 
‘ancient Fathers who have practised and promoted sacred rites”? (Muir, 
Sanskrit Texts, vol. v. p. 310). f 
Lastly, in Rig Veda, iv. 5. 5, there is a reference to some sort of punish- 
ment. ‘‘ This deep abyss has been produced (for those who), being sinners 
false, untrue, go about like women without brothers, like wicked females 
hostile to their husbands ”’ (Muir, Sanskrit Texts, v. 312). 

— * Muir, v. 351, 354. 


464 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


highest heaven is its ruler, he verily knows, (or even) he does not 
know. . . . That One which lay void, and wrapped in nothing- 
ness, was developed by the power of fervour.” + 


\ 


On the other side, the divine power is animistically or magically 
conceived. The gods are held to be nourished by food, to be 
produced from other beings, to sacrifice and to be sacrificed. In 
one hymn Visvakarman is said to sacrifice himself or to himself, 
and he offers up heaven and earth. In another, it appears 
that the gods sacrificed to the supreme god or that they offered 
him up.? Sacrifice is still a magic process from which the 
gods derive strength. Its materials and implements themselves 
become deities and so, too, do prayers and hymns, the Vedas 
themselves, and the priests who control these powers.? ‘The 
Brahmanic sage ranks with the gods.* 


3. Before tracing the outcome of the Vedic religion in India 
we must glance at the parallel development in ancient Iran. 
Springing from the same stock as the Aryan invaders of India 
and worshipping the same gods, the ancient Persians developed 
a form of religion which is in one respect unique. The dualism 
of gods and demons, a frequent incidental feature of polytheism, 
became the central fact of their creed. Originally, it would seem, 
one of the great gods of the common ancestors of the Persian and 
Indian peoples, Ahuramazda gradually assumed a position of 
predominance over the rest. He is already in the time of Darius 
the greatest of all gods, ‘“‘ who made this earth, who made that 
heaven, who made man, who made Darius king.”® But this 
supremacy was not unquestioned. The demons did not disappear 
or become subordinate as in other religions, but maintained a 
perpetual conflict with Ahuramazda and his host, and obtained 
for themselves a leader, the evil spirit Angra Mainya, or, to give 
him the name better known to us, Ahriman. The world of 
spirits is divided into two hostile hosts, who balance one another. 
Ahriman is the precise counterpart of Ahura, the Daévas or 


1 Rig Veda, x. 129, in Muir, vol, v. pp. 356, 357. 

2 Muir, vol. v. p. 372. 

3 ab., v. 411, 142. It seems out of place to regard the deification of 
the power of prayer under the name of the Brahmanaspati as imparting a 
new and more ethical element into religion. Such personifications belong 
rather to the lower magico-animistic stratum in polytheism (see Muir, 
v. 272). 

“* Manu, xiii. 49. Cf. ix. 317, and xi. 35, ete. 

5 Zend Avesta, i., Introduction, p- 61, by Darmesteter, in Sacred Books 
of the East, vol. iv. On the relation of primitive Mazdaism to Vedism, 
the precise nature of which is uncertain, see 7b., lii. 





THE WORLD AND THE SPIRIT 465 
‘demons are opposed to the Amesha Spentas,1 or good spirits, 
‘who assist Ahura. Human life is in a sense the arena of the 
conflict, since it is the forces that are held to work for man’s 
good that are conceived as being ranged under Ahuramazda, and 
the contrary that fight under the banner of Ahriman. Yet the 
battle is not essentially a moral conflict between good and evil. 
It rages throughout physical nature, and is fought in large 
Measure by magical weapons. Animals play a large part in the 
fight—dogs, otters and hedgehogs on the side of Ahura; snakes, 
tortoises, frogs and ants on that of the demons. The dis- 
tinction apparently depended on nothing so rational as the 
utility of the animals, but rather, we may conjecture, on the 
nature and rank of the god whom they incarnated in an earlier 
stage of the creed. To injure one of Ahura’s animal supporters 
was as deadly a crime? as to kill one of Ahriman’s animals was 
‘meritorious. Man also plays his part. His prayers and sacrifices 
assist the gods in their struggle. Conversely, any deviation 
from the rules of ceremonial functions brings evil upon the 
land. In particular, any behaviour which spreads the death in- 
fection, e.g. carrying a corpse by oneself, which renders a man 
‘peculiarly liable to be seized by the death spirit, or polluting 


1 These, however, appear to belong to later developments of the religion 
and are probably importations, perhaps Platonic in origin (7b., p. lvi. and 
lxi.). The original religion had a group of nature gods surrounding Ahura 
Mazda (p. 1xi.). 

2 This has nothing to do with humanity towards animals, but is con- 
cerned purely with the mischievous effects supposed to ensue. Thus “ He 
who kills a water-dog (otter) brings about a drought that dries up pas- 
tures.” Sweetness and fatness will not come back to the land till he is 
smitten to death, and “the holy soul of the dog has been offered up a 
sacrifice.’”” The murderer receives twice ten thousand stripes, and offers a 
great number of gifts to priests; among them, “ he shall godly and piously 
give in marriage to a godly man, a virgin maid whom no man has known 
to redeem his own soul,” a sister or daughter of his (Zend Avesta, 1.; 
Sacred Books, vol. iv. p. 168 ff.). 

The penalty of killing a shepherd’s dog was, at least nominally, eight 
hundred stripes. The murder of a ‘ water-dog’’ was avenged by ten 
thousand stripes (ib., Introduction, p. 84). Darmesteter thinks that 
these penalties must have had a money compensation (7b., pp. 85, 86). 

8 The gods also sacrifice to one another. Not only as an act of worship 
and recognition, as e.g. Ahura sacrifices to the ancient gods (Duncker, Hist. 
Antiq., vol. v. p. 136), but also to one another to add to their strength. 
‘Thus Tistrya, worsted by Apaosha, cries to Ahura: Oh, Ahura Mazda! 
: . men do not worship me with a sacrifice . . . If men had worshipped 
‘me with sacrifice . . . I should have taken to me the strength of ten 
horses, ten bulls, ten mountains, ten rivers. Ahura offers him a sacri- 
fice; he brings him thereby the strength of ten horses, ten camels, ten 
‘bulls, ten mountains, ten rivers; Tistrya runs back to the battle-field 
‘and Apaosha flies before him (Zend Avesta, ii.; Sacred Books, xxii. 
‘99 ff.). 

HH 


466 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


the sacred element of fire by burning a corpse, are unpardon- 
able sins. They involve the community in danger, they 
hamper the gods in their conflict with the demons, and they 
afflict the offender with a taboo of deadly import. | 

But Ahuramazda is the lord of the moral as well as the 
physical world, and there are breaches of morality which incur 
divine wrath no less than magical impurities. Prominent 
among these are falsehood and breach of faith. ‘“‘ The ruffian 
who lies unto Mithra brings death to the whole country.”’* To 
ride, to shoot with the bow, and to speak the truth were, as 
Herodotus tells us, the three lessons learnt by every Persian 
youth. This is borne out by the emphasis laid on truthfulness 
and the honourable observance of obligations. The principle 
holds equally, whether the other party to the bargain be be- 
lievers or unbelievers, fellow-countrymen or foreigners. “* Break 
not the contract, O Spitama, neither the one that thou hast 
entered into with one of the unfaithful, nor the one that thou 
hast entered into with one of the faithful. ... For Mithra 
stands for both the faithful and the unfaithful.” ® 

Scarcely less prominent is the duty of succouring the faith- 
ful with alms. Zarathustra’s ideal, according to Mr. Mills, was 
to establish a kingdom under God, “* whose first care was to re- 
lieve suffering and shelter the honest and industrious poor.’’# 
However this may be, the duty of almsgiving is prominent. To 
refuse alms when entreated by the faithful is one of the offences 

1 Some specimens are worth giving. ‘‘ Two hundred stripes are awarded 
if one tills land in which a corpse has been buried within the year, if a 
woman just delivered of child drinks water. . . . Four hundred stripes if 
one, being in astate of uncleanness, touches water or trees. . . . Five hun- 
dred stripes for killing a whelp, six hundred for killing a stray dog, seven 
hundred for a house dog, eight hundred for a shepherd’s dog, one thousand 
stripes for killing a Vanghapara dog, ten thousand stripes for killing a 
water-dog. Capital punishment is expressly pronounced only against the 
false cleanser and the carrier-alone.’” Repentance and confession with the 
recital of an appropriate formula might save the offender in the next world 
but not in this (Zend Avesta, Introd., p. 84). 

2 4ab., ii. 120. 

3 <b., loc. cit. Lower down the comparative sacredness of different con- 
tracts is expressed numerically in the form ‘‘ Mithra is 20-fold between two 
friends,”’ etc., 7.e. (apparently) 20 times more binding than between two 
persons not connected by any special tie. A list of ten cases is given, the 
sequence of which is curious enough. ‘‘ Mithra,” it appears, is 50-fold 
between wife and husband, but 90-fold between two brothers. He is, 
however, 1000-fold between two nations, and, finally, 10,000-fold when 
connected with the law of Mazda (ib., vol. ii. pp. 149, 150). Accord- 
ing to Mr. L. H. Mills (éb., vol. iii., Introduction, p. xxi.), a mere raid for 
rapine (as opposed to desolation inflicted in regular warfare) was regarded | 
as a terrible thing. 

4 Op. cit., p. xxii. Darmesteter (see vol. iv. p. Ixvii) also places the 
‘“* ethics of labour ’’ among the original features of Mazdaism. 


THE WORLD AND THE SPIRIT 467 


which added to the progeny of the Drug demon.! Hospitality 
is rewarded in the next life, and niggardliness punished. There is 
@ reward for him who wields the power Ahura gave him to 
relieve the poor.2. The moral code as a whole may be fairly 


represented by two passages. The first gives injunctions to the 
faithful. 


“ So be ye discreet from your obedience, most correctly faithful 
in your speech, most saintly from your sanctity, best ordered in 
your exercise of power, least straitened by oppressions, heart- 
easy with rejoicings, most merciful of givers, most helpful to the 
poor, fulfilling most the ritual.”? . . , 


The second withholds a blessing and pronounces a curse on 
the wicked. 


“ Let not our waters be for the man of ill-intent, of evil speech, 
or deeds, or conscience; let them not be for the offender of a 
friend, nor for an insulter of a Magian, nor for one who harms the 
workmen, nor for one who hates his kindred. And let not our 
good waters (which are not only good), but best, and Mazda-made, 
help on the man who strives to mar our settlements, which are not 
to be corrupted, nor let him who would mar our bodies, (our) 
uncorrupted. (selves), nor the thief, nor bludgeon-bearing ruffian 
who would slaughter the disciples, nor a sorcerer, nor a burier of 
dead bodies, nor the jealous, nor the niggard, nor the godless 
heretic who slays disciples, nor the evil tyrant among men. 
Against these may our waters come as torments.” 4 


In sexual matters the magical and the ethical appear to be 
blended. The courtesan is banned as one whose look dries up 
more than one-third of the mighty floods: ‘Such creatures 
dught to be killed more than gliding snakes, than howling 
wolves.” ® The Sodomite is a Daéva, a worshipper of Daévas, 
md in his whole being a Daéva. The first comer might kill him 
without trial, and to do so was a means of redeeming an ordinary 
‘apital crime.6 To touch a woman during the menses is an 
vifence punishable with stripes.? Abortion practised by an 


1) Zend Avesta, i. 201. 2 26., vol. ii. p. 23. 3 4b., iii. 368. 

_ * 4b., 318. The principle of group-morality—here represented by the re- 
gious bond—comes out quaintly in the provision that a would-be doctor is 
0 practise first on Daéva worshippers. If three of them die under his knife, 
© is never to operate on Mazdaists, under the same penalty as for wilful 
aurder. If three recover, he can practise on Mazdaists (7b. i., 85). 
‘ometimes the blessings of the creed are jealously reserved, as in the 
owing : ‘Mazda! Shall the thieving nomad share the good ereed . . .” 
b., iii. 46). But elsewhere there is evidence of a more catholic spirit 
‘nd even of the conversion of a neighbouring tribe. 

| ® 4b., i. 205. $ 74b., 1. 104. 7 4b., p. 188. 


468 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


unmarried girl brings the guilt of wilful murder both on her and 
her lover.t Probably the fear of bringing a curse of barrenness on 
the land is the dominating motive in these ordinances. The “ first 
wailing ” of the goddess Ashi is over the courtesan who destroys 
her fruit; the second is over the courtesan who passes off a 
strange child as her husband’s; the third over “‘ the worst deed 
that men and tyrants do, namely, when they deprive maids that 
have been barren for a long time of marrying and bringing 
forth children.” 2 The procreation of legitimate children is the 
common point of interest in the three cases, and it is quite in 
accordance with the general tendency of the teaching of the 
Avesta that this should be a primary consideration, and that 
everything hostile, or, on magical grounds, conceived to be 
hostile to it, should be a deadly offence. The intermixture of 
magical and ethical ideas is well seen in the list of evils created 
by Angra Mainyu in all the lands which Ahuramazda made. 
They comprise— 

The serpent in the river, winter, the locust, plunder and sin, the 
corn-carrying ants, the sin of unbelief, the stained mosquito, the 
Pairika Knathaiti (idolatry), the sin of pride, the unnatural sin, 
the burying of the dead, the evil work of witchcraft, the sin of 
utter unbelief, the cooking of corpses, abnormal issues in women, 
and barbarian oppression. 


The tendency of the moral element to predominate, however, 
appears in the account of the circumstances giving value to 
prayer. Recitations of the praise of Holiness is of different 
value on different occasions. For instance, if uttered when eat- 
ing the gifts of Havratat and Ameretat, it is worth ten others, 
If when drinking Haoma (the Indian Soma), it is worth a 
hundred. The conception here is primarily magical — the 
quality of the Haoma intensifying the value of the praise, and 
the fact of eating or drinking increasing its effect on the wor- 
shipper. But when, finally, the question is asked: ‘‘ What 
. 1s worth all that is between the earth, and the heavens, 
and this earth, and that luminous space, and all the good things 
made by Mazda, that are the offspring of the good principle in 
greatness, goodness, and fairness ?’’ Ahura Mazda answered : 
“It is that one, O Holy Zarathustra, that a man delivers to re- 
nounce evil thoughts, evil works, and evil deeds.”’* ‘Thus in the 
end the ethical conception of worship is made to predominate. 
Ethical also in essence is the vivid picture of future 

retribution.® ; 


1 Zend Avesta, p. 178. 2 7b., vol. ii. p. 281 ff. * 16., 1. 4 He 
* 4b., ii. 313. 5 40. ii., 315. 


THE WORLD AND THE SPIRIT 469 


_ “At the end of the third night, when the dawn appears, it 
seems to the soul of the faithful one as if it were brought amidst 
.plants and scents; it seems as if a wind were blowing from the 
region of the south, from the regions of the south a sweet- 
scented wind, sweeter-scented than any other wind in the world. 

- “And it seems to the soul of the faithful one as if he were 
‘inhaling that wind with the nostrils, and he thinks: ‘ Whence 
does that wind blow, the sweetest-scented wind I ever inhaled 
with my nostrils ? ’ 

** And it seems to him as if his own conscience were advancing 
to him in that wind, in the shape of a maiden fair, bright, white- 
armed, strong, tall-formed, high-standing, thick-breasted, beauti- 
ful of body, noble, of a glorious seed, of the size of a maidin her 
fifteenth year, as fair as the fairest things in the world. 

“And the soul of the faithful one addresses her, asking: 
-*What maid art thou, who art the fairest maid I have ever 
seen 2?’ 

“And she, being his own conscience, answers him: ‘O thou 
youth of good thoughts, good words, and good deeds, of good 
religion, I am thine own conscience ! ’ 

_ “*Kverybody did love thee for that greatness, goodness, 
fairness, sweet-scentedness, victorious strength and freedom from 
sorrow, in which thou dost appear to me; 

** “ And so thou, O youth of good thoughts,’ etc., ‘didst love me 
for that greatness,’ etc., ‘in which I appear to thee. 

** ¢ When thou wouldst see a man making derision and deeds of 
idolatry, or rejecting (the poor) and shutting his door, then thou 
wouldst sit singing the Gathas and worshipping the good waters 
and Atar, the son of Ahura Mazda, and rejoicing the faithful that 
would come from near or from afar. 

“* T was lovely, and thou madest me still lovelier; I was fair, 
and thou madest me still fairer; I was desirable, and thou madest 
me still more desirable; I was sitting in a forward place, and 
thou madest me sit in the foremost place, through this good 
thought, through this good speech, through this good deed of 
thine; and so henceforth men worship me for my having long 
sacrificed unto and conversed with Ahura Mazda.’ ” 


In the same third night the conscience of the wicked appears 
to him in the form of a “ profligate woman, naked, decayed, 
gaping, bandy-legged, lean-lipped, and unlimitedly spotted, so 
that spot was joined to spot, like the most hideous noxious 
creature, most filthy, and most stinking.” * 

The creed of Zoroaster is not monotheism, though it had 
monotheistic tendencies, which developed in proportion as stress 


1 Zend'Avesia, il. 319, note. 


470 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


was laid on the final victory of Ahuramazda and the destruc- 


tion of Angra Mainya. But neither was it ordinary polytheism. 
_ It was a unique expression of the dualism of nature which few 
other creeds, if any, have ever attempted to face. As such it 
left a legacy in the conception of the devil to later religions. It 
is deeply immersed in magical ideas, which makes its code with 
its grotesque offerings and horrible punishments perhaps the 
most extraordinary document in the whole history of Ethics. 
Yet amid this it had also firmly seized certain moral truths— 
hardly yet the deeper truths of the spiritual religions, but the 
truths consonant to the character of an early civilization—the 
purity of the home life, truthfulness, good faith, neighbourly 
help and hospitality. It conceived that man’s duty is to master 
the earth, to tend the kine, to be fruitful and multiply, and that 
this was to lend power to the good spirit and aid its ultimate 
triumph over the demonic forces of Death and the desert. For 
those who forwarded the work there was a rich reward laid up 
hereafter—and for the evil that appalling meeting with their 
own conscience which was the opening of hell. 


4. A far greater advance on the primitive Indo-Persian 
religion was made in India itself. Here, long before the age 
of Buddha, at a date quite unknown to us, the Vedic religion 
was developed into a metaphysical system, probably the first 
metaphysical religion of history. Not only had the gods been 
traced to emanations from a single principle—this would not 
in itself, perhaps, have brought the Brahman further than the 
esoteric wisdom of Egypt—but, what is for ethical purposes more 
important, this supreme principle was identified with the true 
self or personality of man, an identification which makes the 
spirituality of the Divine for the first time its essential feature. 


“The intelligent, whose body is spirit, ... He is myself, 
within the heart; smaller than a corn of rice, smaller than a corn 
of barley, smaller than a mustard-seed, smaller than a canary- 
seed or the kernel of a canary-seed. He also is myself within the 
heart, greater than the earth, greater than the sky, greater than 
heaven, greater than all these worlds. He from whom all works, 
all desires, all sweet colours and tastes proceed, who embraces all 
this, who never speaks, and who is never surprised, he, myself 
within the heart, is that Brahman. . . . WhenI shall have de- 
parted from hence, I shall obtain him (that Self). He who has 
this faith has no doubt.’’? . | 


1 Upanishads, i. 48. 


THE WORLD AND THE SPIRIT 471 


We have here the first principle of all mysticism, that God 
-and the self are one. But we have also something greater than 
mysticism, the discovery that the true self is something distinct. 
from and opposed to the material body and the life of the senses, 
something that can be smaller than a_ grain of mustard-seed 
because not an object in space at all, yet greater than the uni- 
verse because embracing all things. Matter is not spirit, nor 
_do images and conceptions drawn from matter serve to define 
‘the Spirit, which is known rather by its opposition to them, 
_as the self which we find when we get beneath the bodily shell 
-and think away the objects of sensuous knowledge. Indeed, 
the only doubt is whether the self as that which knows can also 
be known. 


*“* How should he (the Self) know Him by whom he knows all 
this? That self is to be described by No, No! He is incompre- 
hensible, for he cannot be comprehended; he is imperishable, for 

he cannot perish; he is unattached, for he does not attach him- 
self; unfettered, he does not suffer, he does not fail. How, O 
beloved, should he know the Knower ? ”’! 


_ But this sceptical movement does not prevent the triumphant 

identification of the self with the universal Spirit. The self is 
the true totality of things, and he who has achieved this wisdom, 
attaining to self-knowledge and self-mastery, attains also to a 
lordship of all things. 


“* Now follows the explanation of the Infinite asthe ‘I’ ‘Iam 
below; I am above, I am behind, before, right and left—I am 
all this.’ Next follows the explanation of the Infinite as the 
Self. ‘Self is below, above, behind, before, right and left—Self 
is all this.’ ‘ He who sees, perceives, and understands this, loves 
the Self, delights in the Self, revels in the Self, rejoices in the 
Self—he becomes a Svarag (an autocrat or self-ruler); he is lord 
and master in all the worlds. But those who think differently 
from this, live in perishable worlds, and have other beings for 
their rulers.”’ ? 


Inner knowledge is the centre of mysticism; through this 
knowledge man achieves self-mastery, and self-mastery 1s 
world-mastery; for the true self, illusions thrown off, is the 
reality of all that is. How then do men attain knowledge ? 
Neither work, nor prayer, nor much learning, nor penance, are 


1 Upanishads, ii. 185. Cf. Upanishads, p. 112, where the duality 
(of subject and object) involved in knowledge is insisted on, and the 
difficulty is raised how the self which is the knower can also be the known. 

2 4b., 1. 123, 124. 


472 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


sufficient. But these, it would appear, form a ladder whereby 
men escape from the impurity of sensual existence, and reach the 
clearer air of self-mastery. ‘“‘ By truthfulness in deed, by penance 
right knowledge and abstinence must that self be gained.” 1 The 
rules of morality and religious ceremonial are presupposed. 


“There are three branches of the law—sacrifice, study and 
charity are the first; austerity the second; and to dwell as a 
Brahmakarin in the house of a tutor, always mortifying the 
body ./, . is the third,” 


The Brahmanic Code? is naturally more explicit on this point 
than the mystical books. And not only does it make conduct 
the foundation of the spiritual life, but we find it advancing 
to the ethical view that good conduct is truly good only when 
preferred for its own sake, independently of the conception of 
reward or punishment. “The sages, who saw that the sacred 
law is thus grounded on the rule of conduct, have taken good 
conduct to be the most excellent root of all austerity,” + and “‘to 
act solely from a desire for rewards is not laudable, yet an 
exemption from that desire is not (to be found) in this (world), 
for on (that) desire is grounded the study of the Veda and the 
performance of the actions prescribed by the Veda.”® This 
is perhaps a little halting, but in the concluding book of the 
code we find a more emphatic sentence. ‘‘ Acts which secure 
(the fulfilment of) wishes in this world or in the next are called 
pravritta (such as cause a continuation of mundane existence) ; 
but acts performed without any desire (for a reward) preceded 
by (the acquisition) of (true) knowledge, are declared to be 
nivritta (such as cause the cessation of mundane existence) ”’.§ 
Abandonment of all earthly affections is the final condition of 
supreme felicity. “If a man, though well enlightened, is still 
pierced by passion and darkness and attached to his children, 


1 Upanishads, ii. 39. Sometimes the Brahmanist thinker seems to be 
stumbing on the brink of the theory of Election, as: ‘‘ That self cannot 
be gained by the Veda, nor by understanding, nor by much learning. He 
whom the Self chooses, by him the Self can be gained” (ib., ii. 11). For 
abstinence as a condition, cf. i. 130. 

2°40.5 1. 3B. 

3 In citing Manu as evidence for Brahmanic teaching, we must bear in 
mind that the code as we have it is a growth of many centuries incor- 
porating elements of various origin. 'To attempt to disentangle the sources 
of different sections, or to determine their chronological sequence, would, 
however, lead to a special inquiry far beyond the scope of this work. For 
our purposes we must be content to take the code with all its inconsis- 
tencies at its face value, as representing the ideas at work in the Brahmanic 
world over a long period. 

4 Manu, i. 110. ®°4b., dls ee © 2b., xu, 89; 


THE WORLD AND THE SPIRIT 473 


wife and house, then perfect Yoga is never accomplished.”! On 
‘the other hand, perfect knowledge raises man above the capacity 
forsin. Indrasaid .. . “he who knows me thus, by no deed of 
his is his life harmed, not by the murder of his mother, not by 
the murder of his father, not by theft, not by the killing of a 
Brahman. If he is going to commit a sin, the bloom does not 
depart from his face.”’? 

_ Two notes are sounded here that echo through the whole 
history of mystical religion. All ordinary human ties are 
broken by a spiritual principle which puts everything belonging 
to this world into a secondary place. And in close conjunction 
with this feature we have the elevation of an inward state of 
mind as the highest goal, supreme above all conduct—the one 
element in conduct of vital importance being in fact merely the 
self-repression required in order that this inward state may come 
into being. Both these features belong to the first clear appre- 
hension of the spiritual element in man, and its sharp opposition 
to the sensual. In this early stage it cannot be apprehended 
that the truly spiritual is something that forms and inspires the 
world of perception, that fashions lowly efforts to great ends 
and transfigures humble daily life with the light and glow of 
self-sacrifice and love. Become for the first time conscious of 
itself, the spirit wants a dramatic display of its independence. 
It must show its utter contempt for the material world, and in 
this unfortunately it includes those very human relations which 
are the true sphere of its activity. It knows self-control to be 
the foundation of its existence, and it makes the practice of 
self-control the one supreme and all-embracing end of conduct. 
These are common, and on the whole distinctive, features of the 
first stage of spiritual religion. True, the ascetic tendency and 
the cult of pain are deeply rooted in human nature, and play 
an important part even in savage life. Painful initiations as 
tests of virility are one of the commonest of savage institutions. 
Down to the lowest grades men honour those who can endure. 
But it is with the rise of spiritual religion that asceticism takes 
rank as the supreme law of salvation. 

Asceticism links itself naturally to the conception of penance, 
and here again we come in Brahmanism upon the beginnings 
of a spiritual theory of man’s regeneration. We have seen that 
the Babylonian who sought to avoid the consequences of his 
sins had no better method than to resort to an incantation, 
which was in the first place a form of repudiation, and in the 
second place a ceremonial purification, in which the sins were 


1 Upanishads, ii. 326. 2 ib., 1. 283. 


474 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


washed or scoured or thrown away or burnt out of him by one 
of the processes of sympathetic magic. We have also seen 
reasons for thinking that in the Egyptian Judgment of the 
Dead, at least in its old form, the negative confession had a 
similar significance. In the Brahman’s Code we find a distinct 
advance towards an ethical conception of repentance. 


‘‘ By confession, by repentance, by austerity and by reciting 
(the Veda) a sinner is freed from guilt, and in case no other course 
is possible, by liberality. In proportion as a man who has done 
wrong, himself confesses it, even so far he is freed from guilt, as 
a snake from its slough. In proportion as his heart loathes his 
evil deed, even so far is his body freed from that guilt.” 4 


Higher and lower elements contend in this passage. At 
times we seem near to the ethical view of purification through 
the acknowledgment of guilt and the ready acceptance of in- 
evitable suffering, as the way and means towards a true change 
of heart. At other times we relapse into the magical conception 
of the potency of a formula, and learn that “even he who has 
stolen gold instantly becomes free from guilt if he once mutters ” 
a certain hymn.2 The old magic crops up by the side of the 
higher spiritualism, and the veil of mystical imagination drawn 
over al] forbids that clear, remorseless scrutiny by which alone 
the doctrine of the spirit can be kept pure. Apart from the 
medicinal effect of repentance, confession, and forgiveness, the 
Brahmanistic religion took a stringent view of the consequences 
of guilt. If a man did not suffer for guilt in this life, it came 
upon him in the next. After passing through hell, he was re- 
incarnated in some loathsome animal form. If the punishment 
did not fall upon the sinner, it might, by the principle of 
vicarious justice, fall upon his sons or his descendants or his 
ancestors. Manu says, “If (the punishment falls) not on (the 
offender) himself, (it falls) on his sons; if not on the sons, (at 
least) on his grandsons ”; but there is a saving clause which 
shows that vicarious justice no longer wholly satisfies. ‘‘ But 
an iniquity (once) committed never fails to produce fruit to him 
who wrought it.’’? 

The doctrine of transmigration is interwoven with the most 
serious aberration in the Brahmanic ethics, since it offered, as 
we have seen,* a theoretical justification for the deepening 
divisions of caste. We also saw, it is true, that these divisions 

1 Manu, xi. 228, 229, 230. 2 4b., xi. 251; cf. 249, 250, 252. © 

3 4b., iv. 173. ¢ Part I. chap. Vii. 


5 The Sudra, and still more he outcast Kandala, was justly despised and 
kept apart from the Brahman because he was the incarnation of a soul 


THE WORLD AND THE SPIRIT 475 


‘were the subject of much questioning among thinkers. But it 
‘was not the function of Brahmanism to ameliorate social life. 
Life in human society was a life of error in which the true 
Brahman remained only to fulfil his duty to his ancestors by 
begetting a son to continue their cult. His true life was in the 
forest, conquering the senses and coming to the knowledge of 
his spiritual self. Yet with this contempt for worldly values 
-Brahmanism is able to make some advance towards those ethical 
positions which characterize the higher spiritual religions. 
_ The Brahman is to avoid causing pain even within his rights. 
“Let him not be uselessly active with his hands and feet, or 
with his eyes, nor crooked (in his ways), nor talk idly, nor 
injure others by deeds or even think of it.”’!_ Consideration for 
all life, animal as well as human, is in more than one place 
urged, though the rule is not consistently carried through. 
“For that twice-born man, by whom not the smallest danger 
even is caused to created beings, there will be no danger from 
any (quarter) after he is freed from his body.”’? Malice is con- 
demned, “neither a man who (lives) unrighteously, nor he who 
(acquires) wealth (by telling) falsehoods, nor he who always 
‘delights in doing injury, ever attain happiness in this world.’’3 
If the eating of meat except in sacrifice * is forbidden, this is 
perhaps an outcome of primitive ideas which at times verge 
upon zoolatry. But a more rational conception of the general 
sanctity of life is implied in the rule, “‘ Let him never seek to 
destroy an animal without a (lawful) reason ’’ ; and in some places 
a true consideration for animals is blended with rules traceable 
to principles of magic. ‘Let him not travel with untrained 
beasts of burden, nor with (animals) that are tormented by 
hunger or disease, or whose horns, eyes, and hoofs have been 
injured, or whose tails have been disfigured. Let him always 
travel with beasts which are well broken in, swift, endowed with 
lucky marks, and perfect in form and colour, without urging them 
too much with the goad.’”’® As to enemies, the Brahmanistic 
Code does not go so far as Lao Tse in bidding us to recompense 
evil with good,® but it preaches rather the ignoring of an enemy : 


suffering for its misdeeds in some prior existence. Far from bringing 
_Telief to the despised and oppressed, Brahmanism stamped caste divisions 
with the seal of religion, and if it did not invent them, at least gave them 
the iron fixity which holds Indian society bound and fettered to this day. 
1 Manu, iv. 177. . 2 2b., vi. 40. 3 4b., iv. 170. 
Papi wedi. 5 2b., iv. 67, 68. 
§ Yet in the Mahabharata we read the Buddhist verse, ‘‘ Let a man over- 
come anger by kindness, evil by good; let him conquer the stingy by a 
gift, the liar by truth ’”’ (Rhys Davids, Buddhism, p. 130 note). 


476 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


“Let him not show particular attention to an enemy, the 
friend of an enemy, to a wicked man, to a thief, or to the wife 
of another man.’’! If these words hardly suggest that it is 
forgiveness that is in question, but rather the avoidance of 
strife, on the other hand we read further on that forgiveness 
and liberality are means to purification. ‘The learned are 
purified by a forgiving disposition; those who have committed 
forbidden actions by liberality.”2 Yet the following clause 
seems to be the Mosaic law at a little higher remove. “ Making 
over (the merit of his own) good actions to his friends, and (the 
guilt of) his evil deeds to his enemies, he attains the eternal 
Brahman by the practice of meditation.”’* Lastly, forgiveness 
is a maxim of kingcraft. ‘‘ A king who desires his own welfare 
must always forgive litigants, infants, aged and sick men, who 
inveigh against him. He who being abused by men in pain 
pardons (them), will in reward of that (act) be exalted in heaven ; 
but he who, (proud) of his kingly state, forgives them not, will 
for that (reason) sink into hell.” 4 

For the rest, the Brahmanic teaching, as we have seen, 
adheres to the Oriental view of women. It lays down certain 
rules of humanity and chivalry in warfare. In private inter- 
course it teaches the duty of truthfulness combined with courtesy. 
It insists much upon the avoidance of low occupations and mean 
methods of gain,? and even preaches holding aloof from a king 
who is not of a true kingly caste.® 


1 Manu, iv. 133. 2 4b., v. 107. 

3 ib., vi. 79. 4 7ib., viii. 312, 313. 

5 See above, Part I. chap. v. § Part I. chap. vi. 

7 Betting and gambling are declared equivalent to “ open theft” (Manu, 
ix. 222). 


8 “Tet him not accept presents from a king who is not descended from 
the Kshatriya race, nor from butchers, oil-manufacturers, and publicans, nor 
from those who subsist by the gain of prostitutes. One oil-press is as (bad) 
as ten slaughter-houses, one tavern as (bad) as ten oil-presses, one brothel 
as (bad as) ten taverns, one king as (bad as) ten brothels. A king is 
declared to be equal (in wickedness) to a butcher who keeps a hundred 
thousand slaughter-houses ; to accept presents from him is a terrible (crime). 
He who accepts presents from an avaricious king, who acts contrary to the 
Institutes (of the sacred law), will go in succession to the following twenty- 
one hells”? (Manu, iv. 84, etc.). Some conception of the spirit of the 
Brahmanic Code, and of the very diverse elements entering into it, may 
be obtained by comparing the lists of principal and minor offences. The 
following are mortal sins : ‘“‘ Killing a Brahmana, drinking (the spirituous 
liquor called) Sura, stealing (the gold of a Brahmana), adultery with a 
Guru’s wife, and associating with such (offenders) . . . Slayingafriend . . . 
stealing men . . . carnal intercourse with sisters by the same mother, with 
(unmarried) maidens, with females of the lowest castes, with the wives of 
a friend, or of a son.” . . . On the other hand: ‘“ Adultery, selling one- 
self, allowing one’s younger brother to marry first, . . . giving a daughter 


THE WORLD AND THE SPIRIT 477 


The Brahmanic Code is not the work of reformers or of men 


inspired with a social or humane ideal. It is the code of a 
society in which barbaric elements survive, but which has made 


great advances in civilization, and of a priesthood which has 
grasped certain sides of spiritual truth, but has neither disen- 


cumbered itself of primitive ways of thought, nor advanced to 


the point at which the ethical and spiritual unite. Its spiritual 
interpretation of the divine unity was such as readily to make 
terms with polytheism. For though all the gods and all human 
beings too were emanations from the one spirit, it does not 


follow that the many gods lose their reality. On the contrary, 


the way is prepared for the series of emanations—Vishnu, an 
emanation from Brahma; Krishna, an emanation of Vishnu; and 
Krishna himself impersonated in many successive incarnations— 
a system which retains many of the essentials of polytheism, 
under the shell of metaphysical theory. What was worse was 
that its mysticism could make terms with magic; it could 
find spiritual efficacy in a formula, and conceive austerity as 
conferring, not an ethical self-conquest, but miraculous powers. 
Finally, at its best, the Brahmanic view of life is pessimistic and 


its highest ideal is the sage who, having performed his duties, 


has emancipated himself from human relations and entered into 
the spiritual kingdom of the god within his breast. It contains 
no message of comfort for the sufferer, of love, of forgiveness, of 
humility. Still less does it. proclaim an ideal of social justice. 
It leaves us with the picture of the emaciated hermit dreaming, 
in the trance of semi-starvation, of himself as one with the 
centre of things, a God self-created by his own afflicted brain. 


5. The relation of Buddhism to Brahmanism has sometimes 


) been compared to that of Protestantism to the Catholic Church. 


It is, at any rate, only by appreciating the central doctrines of 


-Brahmanism that we can begin to understand Buddha’s attitude. 
The Brahman held life to be on the whole an evil, from which 


it was the object of the higher knowledge to deliver its possessor. 


Every Brahmanic system had its own theory of the method of 
escape from the chain of existences. Buddha had a new theory, 


} 


| 


I 


= 
: 


) 


and one which, with the same element of pessimism at its root, 





to . . . (either brother) . . . defiling a damsel, usury, . . . selling a tank, 
@ garden, one’s wife, or child, . . . living as a Vratya, casting off a relative, 
. superintending mines, . . . subsisting on (the earnings of) one’s wife 
. cutting down green trees for firewood, doing acts for one’s own 
advantage only, . . . slaying women, Sudras, Vaisyas, or Kshatriyas, and 
atheism ” are all minor offences causing loss of caste. 


478 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


was in closer touch alike with average human nature and with 
the higher ethical consciousness of mankind. Buddha’s great 
discovery was the want of permanence in the whole world of 
phenomena, the whole world of change. Whatever has a 
beginning must also have an end. And so there appeared the 
possibility of an ultimate cessation from the wheel of suffering, 
an ultimate disentanglement from the chain of earthly existences. 
Transmigration is, in a modified form, a central doctrine still, 
but it is not strictly a transmigration of the soul, for the soul, 
according to the strict Buddhist, is a figment. The constitutive 
elements of the human being come together at birth, and are 
dissolved at death. If the good and evil he does live after him, 
it must be very strictly maintained that it is the good and evil 
only that live and not he himself. In other words, every cause 
has its effect. Whatever good I do has a permanent, so to say, 
spiritual efficacy, and equally whatever evil I do. But the 
effect is shown in a peculiar way. My personality does not 
survive, but my good and my evil works survive, and they deter- 
mine the fate of another being, which comes into existence, as 
it were, to carry on my moral destiny. This is the difficult 
and much misunderstood dectrine of Karma, a doctrine which a 
modern metaphysician might phrase somewhat after this fashion : 
that it destroys the substantiality of the soul while leaving its 
causality ; the stream of moral consequences becomes a stream of 
mere causation from which the personality of the moral subject 
is removed. But, further, Karma has, as it were, one central 
cause—Desire, the will to live, self-assertion. It is on account 
of this desire that I maintain my individuality, that I remain shut 
up within my selfish interests, that I maintain myself as a dis- 
tinct being from the universe at large; and because this desire 
is, Karma is, and the results of my personal character are 
perpetuated. If I would seek emancipation from the chain of 
earthly existences I must put an end to Karma, and to put an 
end to Karma I must put an end to desire; and to put an end 
to desire I must train myself in the doctrines of the Buddha 
which teach me the unreality and the valuelessness of all earthly 
things, and raise me to that emancipation from self, from worldly 
interests, from all care for the things of this transitory being, 
which is for the Buddhist the dream of bliss. I must, in short, 
attain to the extinction of individuality—that is, to use a technical 
and deeply misunderstood term, to Nirvana, for Nirvana is not, 
as is often thought, utter extinction; on the contrary, it is a 
real state of real people in-this earthly existence, it is the state 
of the Arahat, a state reached by those who have trodden the 


THE WORLD AND THE SPIRIT 479 


_ path marked out for them to the end and gained the summit of 
_the ascent. Nirvana means extinction, but it does not mean 
- extinction of life, but extinction of those desires and lusts which | 
war, not, as in Christianity, against the soul, but rather for 
the perpetuation of individuality, which form a barrier between 


the world and me, which make me, in short, an individual, and 


_ prevent me from reaching that state of blissful contemplation, 
of perfect benevolence, and total selflessness which alone can 


prevent the law of Karma from bringing another being into 
existence in my place, when my earthly career is ended. We 


- now have before us the “‘ four noble truths ”’ in which the doctrine 
_of Buddha issummed up. The first is the truth about suffering. 


All transient existence involves suffering; birth and death, 
growth and decay, the frustration of desire, the longing that can- 
not be satisfied, all that belongs to our existence as individuals— 
all are full of suffering. There may be joy too, but pain cometh 
at the end, and the word is written large over the final balance- 
ment of accounts. The second truth is the truth about the cause 
of suffering, whichis the craving for the satisfaction of desire, 
the craving that maintains life and causes its renewal. The third 


truth is that suffering is brought to an end by the conquest of 


this craving. And the fourth truth is that the path leading to 
the cessation of suffering is the ‘noble eight-fold path,’ by 





which the craving of desire is laid to rest.1 The eight-fold path, 
therefore, contains in little both the ethics and the practical 
religion of Buddhism, which is on the one hand opposed to the 
sensuality of this life, and on the other to the ascetic extremes 
of Brahmanism. 


“ What is that middle path, O Bhikkus, avoiding these two 
extremes discovered by the Tathagata? Verily! it is this noble 
eight-fold path; that is to say— 

“ Right views ; 

Right aspirations ; 
Right speech ; 

Right conduct ; 

Right livelihood ; 

Right effort ; 

Right mindfulness; and 
Right contemplation.” ? 


The pursuit of the eight-fold noble path liberated the follower 


of Buddha from the ten following fetters in succession, namely : 


1. Delusion of self. 2. Doubt. 3. Dependence on _ works. 


1 Buddhist Suttas, Sacred Books of the Hast, vol. xi. pp. 148, 149. 
2 Op. cit., pp. 146, 147. 


480 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


4, Sensuality. 5. Hatred. 6. Love of life on earth. 7. Desire 
forlifein Heaven. 8. Pride. 9. Self-righteousness. 10. Ignor- 
ance. It is not till the first five fetters are destroyed that the 
Buddhist becomes an Arahat, and it is not until the remaining 
five are abolished that he has finally put an end to delusion and 
sorrow.t It was not impossible for a layman, living the ordinary 
life of a householder, to enter upon the path and even to attain 
to Nirvana, but though not impossible, it was extremely difficult. 


“* Full of hindrances is household life, a path defiled by passion ; 
free as the air is the life of him who has renounced all worldly 
things. How difficult is it for the man who dwells at home to live 
the higher life in all its fulness, in all its purity, in all its bright 
perfection! Let me then cut off my hair and beard, let me clothe 
myself in the orange-coloured robes, and let me go forth from a 
household life into the homeless state.” 2 


Hence the order of mendicants, or Bhikkhus, an order of celi- 
bates who were to attain to Nirvana, or to tread the path to 
Nirvana, as each individual’s capacity would allow him, and to 
reach it, not by exaggerated abstinence, or extreme mortification 
of the flesh, but by simple adhesion to rules of life based on the 
conception of virtue as resting in selflessness, the avoidance of 
desire, the avoidance of injury to others, the cultivation of love, 
and the destruction of hatred. These were the simple elements 
constituting the rules of the Bhikkhu’s life and simply formulated 
in the eight precepts— 


“One should not destroy life. 
One should not take that which is not given. 
One should not tell lies. | 
One should not become a drinker of intoxicating liquors. 
One should refrain from unlawful sexual intercourse—an 
ignoble thing. 
One should not eat unseasonable food at nights. 
One should not wear garlands or use perfumes. 
One should sleep on a mat spread on the ground.” 3 


These eight precepts apply to all Buddhists, including house- 
holders.4 Two more are binding on mendicants, namely, to 
abstain from dancing, music, and stage plays, and from the use 
of gold and silver. These form with the first eight the ten moral 
rules of the order. With these may be compared the division 
into ten sins— 

1 See Rhys Davids, Manual of Buddhism, pp. 109, 110, etc. 
2 Suttas, pp. 187, 188. 


’ Rhys Davids, Buddhism, p. 139. 
The three last, however, are not obligatory. 


THE WORLD AND THE SPIRIT 481 


“ Three of the body— 

Taking life, 
Theft (taking what has not been given), 
Unlawful sexual intercourse. 

Four of speech— 
Lying, 
Slander (includes ‘ saying here what one hears there ’), 
Abuse (swearing), 
Vain conversation. 

Three of the mind— 
Covetousness, 
Malice, 
Scepticism.” 4 


Further, the Buddhist Manual of Ethics classifies moral duties 
under six heads: The natural obligations of Parents and 
Children, of Pupils and Teachers, of Husbands and Wives, of 
Friends and Companions, of Masters and Servants, of Laymen 
and the Religious. The insistence on the duties of the husband 
is noteworthy. 


“The husband should cherish his wife— 
By treating her with respect. 
By treating her with kindness. 
By being faithful to her. 
By causing her to be honoured by others, 
By giving her suitable ornaments and clothes.” ? 


Still more the injunctions on masters. 


“ The master should provide for the welfare of his dependents— 
By apportioning work to them according to their strength. 
By supplying suitable food and wages. 
By tending them in sickness. 
By sharing with them unusual delicacies. 
By now and then granting them holidays.” ® 


The Manual concludes that liberality, courtesy, kindliness and 
inselfishness—‘“‘ these are to the world what the linchpin is to 
she rolling chariot.” 


_ 6. The character of the true Buddhist is summarized in the 
short paragraphs on conduct. 


“ He abstains from destroying life . . . and full of modesty and 
ity, he is compassionate and kind to all creatures that have 
ife. . He abstains from taking anything not given. . He 
ives a life of chastity and purity, averse to the low habit of sexual 


1 Rhys Davids, Buddhism, p. 142. 2 Op. cit., p. 145. 3 76., p. 146. 
a 


482 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


intercourse. ... He abstains from speaking falsehood. He 
abstains from calumny. What he hears here, he repeats not 
elsewhere to raise a quarrel against the people here. Thus he 
lives as a binder together of those who are divided, a peace-maker, 
a lover of peace, impassioned for peace, a speaker of words that 
make for peace. . . . He abstains from harsh language. What- 
ever word is humane, pleasant to the ear, lovely, reaching to the 
heart, urbane, pleasing to the people, beloved of the people— 
such are the words he speaks. . . . He abstains from vain con- 
versation. He refrains from injuring any herb or any creature. 
He takes but one meal a day. . . . He abstains from dancing, 
singing, music, and theatrical shows. . . . He abstains from the 
getting of silver or gold. He abstains from the getting of grain 
uncooked. He abstains from the getting of flesh that is raw. 
He abstains from the getting of any woman or girl. He abstains 
from the getting of bondmen or bondwomen. He abstains from 
the getting of sheep or goats. . . . He refrains from carrying 
out those commissions on which messengers can be sent. He 
refrains from buying and selling. He abstains from tricks with 
false weights, alloyed metals, or false measures. He abstains 
from bribery, cheating, fraud, and crooked ways. He refrains 
from maiming, killing, imprisoning, highway robbery, plundering 
villages, or obtaining money by threats of violence.” + 


‘ 


These precepts are expanded in the “ middle”’ and “long ”’ 
paragraphs, which further reprehend combats between animals, 
games of many kinds “ detrimental to progress in virtue,” mean 
talk, such as “ tales of kings, of robbers, or of ministers of state : 
tales of arms, of war, of terror, conversation respecting women, 
warriors, demi-gods, ghost stories, empty tales.” They depre- 
cate wrangling about orthodoxy; reproach those who perform 
‘the servile duties of a go-between,” that is, between kings, 
ministers of state, Brahmans, etc.; denounce hypocrisy, divina- 
tion, magic; reprobate those who make their living by predict- 
ing eclipses, or a rainfall, “‘or by drawing up deeds, making up 
accounts, giving pills, making verses, or arguing points of 
casuistry ’’; by giving advice about marriage, imparting magical 
formule, and so forth. If some of these prohibitions appear to 
us oddly assorted, the general purport is clear enough. The 
follower of Buddha is to hold aloof, on the one hand, from the 
frivolities and sensualities of the life of pleasure; on the other, 
from the quackery and professions? mixed up with quackery 

1 Suttas, p. 189. 

2 In the Vinaya Tewvts, vol. iii. p. 152, sacrifices to the gods are included 
among the “low arts’ which a Bhikkhu is not to teach. On the other 


hand, in vol. il. p. 103, the prudent man, wherever he takes up his abode, | 
is recommended “ to make offerings ”’ to all such deities as may be there. 


THE WORLD AND THE SPIRIT 483 


‘into which the lower forms of religion so easily slide. But 
underlying all this is the ideal goodness as consisting in universal 
love. 


“And he lets his mind pervade one quarter of the world with 
thoughts of love, and so the second, and so the third, and so the 
fourth. And thus the whole wide world, above, below, around 
and everywhere, does he continue to pervade with heart of Love, 
far-reaching, grown great, and beyond measure. Just, Vasettha, 
as a mighty trumpeter makes himself heard—and that without 
difficulty—in all the four directions; even so of all things that 
‘have shape or life, there is not one that he passes by or leaves 
; ae pot regards them all with mind set free, and deep-felt 
love.” 


With this we may compare the character of the great King of 
Glory, the ideal Buddhist ruler, realized in some measure in the 
great King Asoka of Magadha. The King of Glory’s greatness 
depends on three qualities: those of forgiving, of self-conquest, 
and self-control. And in this rule of love the doctrine of Lao Tse 
is fully observed. 


“For never in this world does hatred cease by hatred ; 
Hatred ceases by love; this is always its nature.” 
“Whatever an enemy may do.to an enemy, 
Or an angry man to an angry man, 
A mind intent on what is wrong 
Works evil worse.” 

“One may conquer a thousand thousand men in battle, _ 
But-he-who-conguers himself alone is the greatest victor.” 
_ “Tet a man overcome anger by kindness, evil by good; 
Let him conquer the stingy by a gift, the liar by truth.” ? 

: 


The Gospel precepts of humility and self-knowledge naturally 
find a place here. “‘ Not the perversities of others, not their 
sins of commission and omission, but his own misdeeds and 
‘negligences should a sage take notice of’; and again, “‘ One’s 
wn self conquered is better than all other people.’’* Spiritual 
perfection is the supreme object and higher than all sacrifices. 








‘ 1 Buddhist Suttas, p. 201. 

2 Rhys Davids, p. 128. Compare the story of King Dighiliin the Vinaya 
Texts, vol. ii. p. 298 ff. 
' 3 Dhammapada, chap. iv. 50; 7b., viii. 104. Compare the rule, “ No 
3hikkhu who has not given leave may be reproved for an offence—I 
srescribe, O Bhikkhus, that you reprove Bhikkhus for an offence only 
ifter having first asked leave by saying, Give me leave, reverend brother, 
| wish to speak to you ” (Vinaya Texts, vol. i. p. 264). 
' For the mildness of penalties in the early Buddhist order, cf. vol. iii. 
». 119, and the translator’s remarks. 


484 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


‘‘Tf 9 man for a hundred years sacrifice month by month with 
a thousand, and if he, but for one moment, pay homage to a 
man whose soul is grounded (in true knowledge), better is that 
homage than a sacrifice for a hundred years.” + The “ Arahat” 
is as far above earthly things as the stoical wise man. “ As 
a solid rock is not shaken by the wind, wise people falter not 
amidst blame and praise.’”’? But by the same consequence 
responsibility and purification are individual. “ By oneself the. 
evil is done, by oneself one suffers, by oneself evil is left undone, 
by oneself one is purified. . . . No one can purify another.” * 
And the essence of purification is the ethical change of heart. 
Buddha accepts the confession and petition for forgiveness of 
Vaddha the Tikkhavi. ‘‘ For this, O friend Vaddha, is the 
advantage of the discipline of the noble one, that he who looks 
upon his sin as sin and makes amends for it as is meet, he becomes 
able in future to restrain himself therefrom.’ * The saint must 
not look for success in this world. He finds his happiness in 
disregarding its hate. ‘‘We live happily indeed, not hating 
those who hate us.”> Again, ‘‘ Victory breeds hatred, for the 
conquered is unhappy.” ® Again, “Not to blame, not to 
strike . . . to be moderate in eating, to sleep and sit alone and 
to dwell on the highest thoughts, this is the teaching of the 
Awakened.” ? Hence the duty of non-resistance: “No one) 
should attack a Brahmana, but no Brahmana (if attacked), 
should let himself fly at his aggressor. Woe to him who strikes 
a Brahmana, more woe to him who flies at his aggressor.” ® The 
distinctions of caste are overcome— | 

“T do not call a man a Brahmana because of his origin, or of 


his mother, but the poor who is free from all attachments, him J. 
call a Brahmana.’® ‘‘ Him I call indeed a Brahmana who, 


1 Dhammapada, viii. 106. 2 4b., vi. 81. 

3 ib., xii. 165. 4 Vinaya Teats, vol. iii. p. 123. 
5 Dhammapada, xv. 197. 6 7b., xv. 201. 

7 4b., xiv. 185. § 16., xxvi. 389. 


Ordination, however, was forbidden, not only to criminals and debtors | 
but to slaves, eunuchs, dwarfs, hunchbacks, one-eyed people, the blind, 
dumb and deaf; to a person that gave offence (by depravity) to those why 
saw him, ete. (Vinaya Teats, vol. i. pp. 199, 224-225; cf. p. 215). A 
quaint rule prohibits the ordination of an animal on the strength of a story 
of a serpent taking human shape and becoming ordained (¢6., pp. 217-219), 
and one of the questions asked of candidates was, “Are you a humaii 
being? ”’ (vol. ili. p. 349). ] 

Women were admitted to ordination, but according to the account im 
the Vinaya Texts with much reluctance and in an inferior position. The 
Buddha at first declines altogether to institute a female order, but is over- 
persuaded by the faithful Ananda. Yet he foresees disaster as a consequence, 
wholly refuses to put Bhikkhunis and Bhikkhus on an equality, forbids any 
censure of Bhikkhus by Bhikkhunis, and ordains that a Bhikkhuni even 


V) 







THE WORLD AND THE SPIRIT 485 







| though he has committed no offence, endures reproach, stripes, 
,and bonds, who has endurance for his force, and strength for his 
yarmy. Him I call indeed a Brahmana who is tolerant with the © 
intolerant, mild with the violent, and free from greed among the 
“greedy. Him I call indeed a Brahmana from whom anger and 
hatred, pride and hypocrisy have dropt like a mustard-seed from 
the point of a needle.”’ } 


. This morality does not rest on a theological basis ; though 
Buddha does not deny the gods, they play no important part in 
this scheme. It is rather the inherent character and inevitable 
consequences of conduct with which he is concerned. The ideas 
‘of reward and punishment are not indeed wholly absent, for not 
-only is there reward in a temporary heaven and punishment in 
.a temporary hell for those in the lower stages of the path,? but 
‘those who reach the highest are rewarded by the final cessation 
fof the circle of existences. But this, after all, is a very negative 
sreward. The noblest prize that Buddha offers to man is to 
attain in this life and now to inward perfection. Such perfection 
Jhas its essence in the absence of passion and desire, and its 
‘manifestation in universal love, in forgiveness of sin, in for- 
“bearance with the wrong-doer, in humility and self-respect. it 
1s an inward state obtainable by all men, and also by all women, 
‘independently of caste, nationality, or sex. Love is for all and 
‘salvation is open to all. 





7. The selflessness of spiritual religion is carried to the point 
of self-emptying, the negation of action along with desire, in 
some forms of Mysticism. Of such Quietism probably the 
earliest extant expression is to be found in The Path of Virtue, 
by Lao Tse, an older contemporary of Confucius. Lao Tse is 
no theologian, but his system is historically connected with the 
Chinese conception of magical influences interpenctrating the 
whole physical world. The Tao, which is variously rendered by 
Way, Path, Truth, Reason,® is the course or process of the 
universe,* or perhaps, we may say, it is the one BENDS on 





# a hundred years old, shall make obeisance to a Bhikkhu even if newly 
initiated. On the other hand, all confessions of women are to be made to 
women, and all disciplinary proceedings to be carried out in the same way 
(Vinaya Texts, vol. iii. pp. 320-332). It is hardly necessary to remark 
that the ascription of these details to Buddha himself is of no historical 
authority. 
1 Dhammapada, p. 92, secs, 396, 399, 406, 407. 

2 Strictly speaking, this part of the doctrine would have to be qualified 
by what has been said above as to Karma. 
8 Old, The Simple Way, p. 20. 
_ * De Groot, Religious System of China, iv. 67. 


486 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


which all the processes making up the life of the universe depend, 
or in which they are expressed. Itis a magical conception refined 
into a metaphysical principle and made the basis of a system of 
mystical ethics. For the leading idea of the Tao would appear 
to be that man should surrender himself, his individuality, his 
self-assertion, his efforts to be positive, to rule others for their 
good, to be virtuous and benevolent—that he should abandon this 
vain self-assertion, and merge himself in the main stream of 
being which, flowing on its own course, sets all wrongs right, 
brings the proud to the ground, and exalts the humble and 
meek. ‘‘ The sage governs by ridding the heart of its desires.”’ + 
Going back to one’s origin is called Peace: it is the giving 
oneself over to the inevitable.2 The mystical paradox is that 
this excellent passivity is in reality the most effective of all modes 
of action. The sage “acts through non-action and by this he 
governs all.”’? The soft and the weak overcome the hard and 
strong.4 To teach without words and to be useful without action 
—few among men attain to this. Even from the personal point 
of view it is selflessness and restraint that yield happiness. 
‘The more he (the wise man) gives to others, the more he has 
for his own.’ ® ‘(The woman) conquers the man by continual 
quietness.” ? This wisdom practised by each would make virtue 
prevail in the community.’ For coercion is no remedy for social 
ills. “‘ When the actions of the people are controlled by pro- 
hibited laws, the country becomes more and more impoverished. 
The wise man says, ‘I will design nothing, and the people shall 
shape themselves. I will keep quiet, and the people will find 
their rest. I will not’ assert myself, and the people will come 
forth. I will discountenance ambition, and the people will re- 
vert to their natural simplicity.’ ’’® But not only is the govern- 
ment of the clever politician a “scourge.” The ordinary virtues 
are really stumbling-blocks and rocks of offence. ‘‘ By giving up 
their self-righteousness and abandoning their wisdom the people 
would be immensely improved. Forsaking Charity and Duty 
to the neighbour, they might revert to their natural relations.”’ 1 
That is to say, each should cultivate inward perfection and 
entire restraint—outward active virtues are a poor substitute for 
these. When Tao is lost it gives place to virtue, similarly in a 
descending scale virtue yields to benevolence, benevolence to 
justice, justice to expediency. In this excellent passivity 


1 Old, chap. iii. 2 4b., chap. xvi. 3 4b., chap. iii. 
4 1b., chap. xxxvi. .> 7., chap. xliii. 6 4b., chap. Ixxxi. 
7 4b., chap. lxi. 8 «b., chap. lix. ® ib., chap. lvii. 


10 40,, Chap. xix, 11 4b., chap. xxxviii. 


THE WORLD AND THE SPIRIT 487 


‘certain virtues are inculcated in their most ideal form—humility, 
universal charity, love of enemies: “The wise man knows no 
distinctions ; he beholds all men as things made for holy uses.” 1 
_“ By governing the people with love it is possible to remain 
unknown.” ? “To joy in conquest is to joy in the loss of human 
life,’*? and “whosoever humbleth himself shall be exalted, 
-and whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased.’’4 The doctrine 
of forgiveness is pushed to its furthest point: “I would return 
good for good. [ would also return good for evil. . . . 1 would 
likewise meet suspicion with confidence.” > And though wisdom 
prescribes passivity this is not from selfishness, for “the wise 
man lives . . . with modest restraint, and his heart goes out 
in sympathy to all men.’’® He is inactive because this is the | 
method of true happiness. For “the wise man is a constant and 
good helper of his fellows,” ? and the virtuous man acts “* without 
hope of reward.” § 

Such is the first recorded expression of the full doctrine of 
non-resistance—a doctrine which, however one-sided and in- 
applicable to the affairs of men, enshrines the profound truth 
that moral influence is distinct from and superior to physical com- 
pulsion ; that force, however necessary in immediate exigencies, 
settles nothing in the end, but is a menace to the moral balance 
of the society and of the individual that employ it; that men 
are capable of being influenced, not only by retaliation, but also, 
and more profoundly, by the deliberate refusal to retaliate. The 
system of Quietism gave an extreme expression to these truths. 
The world will always reject its ideas, and will always be haunted 
by them until the time comes when, disregarding the extrava- 
gances of form in which they are uttered, it begins to ask itself 
in sober earnestness what truth they contain. 

Putting aside the idiosyncrasies of different doctrines and 
considering only the ethical teaching of the spiritual religions— 
what advances and what limitations do we find? To begin with 
—a certain ideal of character is preached as the goal of man’s 
endeavours. To cultivate the best within himself and to aid others 
in the same work is the means of salvation. Human character, 
which in the lowest stages of moral thought is scarcely ever © 
appreciated as a condition and cause of actions, is now a distinct 
object of activity, an end and aim of endeavour. Next, this ideal 
of character is conceived negatively as the destruction of selfish- 
ness, positively as the exercise of universal love. Here, again, 


1 Old, chap. v. 2 ¢b., chap. x. 3 4b., chap. xxxi. 
* ib., chap. xxii. 5 7b., chap. xlix. 6 4b., chap. xlix. 
? 4b., chap. xxvii. 8 4b., chap. x. 


488 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


elements which exist in all ethics from the lowest stage upwards 
are separated out and made into principles ruling conduct. For 
in the most primitive sense of duty to fellow-clansmen there is 
something of love and something of unselfishness, and something 
of the surrender of one’s own desires and ways of thinking and 
personal pride. But these social centripetal qualities that tend 
to bind men together are inextricably intertwined with the fierce 
resentments, the pride of family or race, the antagonisms which 
break up human fellowship and keep men apart. Hence the 
group-morality of early times that we have described. Now in 
this higher stage of religion and ethics we see the socially con- 
structive qualities distinguished and idealized and recognized as 
the source of human salvation. And yet, so roundabout is the 
path of human advance, in the very act and fact of being so 
idealized, their character as social qualities, their usefulness in 
organizing society, are in large measure annulled. ‘They are con- 
ceived as being best cultivated apart from ordinary human ties, 
and as the foundation of a monastic brotherhood rather than of 
a living human society. Their negative side is emphasized. 
Self-negation is made more prominent than active kindness and 
love. Universal benevolence is held incompatible with the 
passionate personal love of woman and of child. The practice 
of ideal virtues seems too hard for the householder and the man 
of affairs. Those very qualities which should refine the world 
are thought to be soiled by the world. Self-surrender and 
universal love—the two pillars of the higher ethics—are set up, 
but they are left standing in a void. 


CHAPTER 1V 
MONOTHEISM 


1. To the western world spiritual religion is familiar mainly 
in the form of the worship of one God, the creator and sustainer 
of all that is. If we conceive this form of belief as developing 
out of polytheism we may find approximations to it by several 
distinct paths. There is, first, the exaltation of one God as king 
over the rest, which will only lead to monotheism if the lesser 
deities become degraded to some lower plane of being. There 
‘is, secondly, the identification of all the gods with some one, an 
example of which has been seen in the Vedas. This is a natural 
effect of the feeling of worship, but it is checked in its develop- 
ment by the tendency to apply it to each god in turn, the result 
of which is that no single god obtains a definite and permanent 
‘supremacy. There is another and more subtle variant of this 
process wherein the several gods of mythology come to be re- 
garded as manifestations of an underlying force, principle, or 
spirit, which is the sole reality—a line of development which 
leads rather towards Pantheism than towards Monotheism in 
the strict sense of the term. There is, lastly, the line of develop- 
ment which lies through the exclusive worship of one national 
god. This is the path through Monolatry to Monotheism, which 
was trodden in particular by the Jews. The Yahveh of early 
Judaism was not the one God, as we understand the term, but 
was the only God whom it was lawful for the Jews to worship. 
Yahveh was the God of Israel, just as Chemosh was the God of 
Moab. To each people, in Jephthah’s view, their god has given 
their land, and this gift is their title thereto.1 The worship of 
Yahveh is properly confined to the soil of Canaan. To be driven 
thence is to be compelled to serve other gods.2, Even in Deu- 
1 Judges xi. 24. ‘“‘ Wilt thou not possess that which Chemosh thy god 
giveth thee to possess? So whomsoever the Lord our God hath dis- 
possessed from before us, them will we possess.’? The power of Chemosh 
seems implicitly recognized in 2 Kings ili. 27. Cf. Montefiore, Hibbert 
Lectures, p. 35. 

2 Montefiore, 1b. 1 Samuel xxvi.19. Apparently this is the reason why 
Naaman begs two mules’ burden of earth of Elisha, “ for thy servant will 
henceforth offer neither burnt offering nor sacrifice unto other gods but 
unto the Lord” (2 Kings v. 17). These must be offered on Canaanitish 


soil. 
489 


F | 


490 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


teronomy, the First Commandment does not deny the existence 
of other gods, but forbids their being worshipped “ before Me ” 
or ‘‘ beside Me.’ Indeed, the Hosts of Heaven were in reality 
gods appointed by Yahveh himself for the protection of the 
nations of the world. They were gods, but God himself sat 
supreme in the congregation of gods, and while he had divided 
the lower gods among all the peoples under heaven, he had re- 
served the direct worship of himself alone for the children of 
Israel.22 Hven when God controls the whole upper earth, his 
writ does not at first run in the underworld: “ Shall the pit give 
thanks unto Thee, or shall it declare Thy truth?” It is a late 
Psalm which says: “If I climb up into heaven Thou art there, 
if I go down into hell Thou art there also.”’? The oneness of 
God and his supremacy over the whole earth are ideas which 
arose comparatively late in Hebrew thought, and are conse- 
quences rather than causes of a changed conception of his char- 
acter. If Monotheism is taught—though indeed the teaching 
is implied rather than distinctly avowed—in the prophets before 
the exile, it is because with them the spirituality of Yahveh, his 
indifference to sacrifice and his love of righteousness are always 
first and foremost. It is his unique character which makes him 
the one and only God. God is not the Ideal Being because 
he is One, but is One because he is the Ideal Being, the 
impersonation of the moral law. This is widely removed from 
the primitive conception. The earlier Yahveh had a well-defined 
human personality. He walks in the garden of Eden in the cool 
of the evening. He smells the sweet savour of Noah’s sacrifice 
and declares that he will never again curse the ground for man’s 
sake. He is not wholly without fear of the men that he has 
made. They may obtain too much power. Adam “is become 
one of Us.’”’ When men have all one language they attempt, 
like the giants who piled Pelion on Ossa, to build a tower that 
will reach to heaven, “‘ and now nothing will be withholden from 
them which they purpose to do.”’ ‘‘ So the Lord,” having con- 
founded their language, “scattered them abroad upon the face 
of all the earth.” * He has not alwaysa human shape. He can 

1 R.V. marginal rendering, Deut. v. 7. 

2 Deut. iv. 19. Cf. Driver, Deut., pp. 70, 71. Here monolatry fuses 
with the conception of a chief god. Yet in the very same chapter we find 
a different thought, the thought achieved with difficulty by the prophets. 
The gods of the nations are idols, ‘‘ the work of men’s hands, wood and 
stone, which neither see, nor hear, nor eat, nor smell” (Deut. iv. 28). 
Parallel passages are given by Driver, p. 73. 

3 The same idea, however, as Dr. Carpenter points out to me, is ex- 


pressed by as early a writer as Amos (ix. 2). 
4 Genesis xi. 6-8. 


MONOTHEISM 49] 


_ appear in a thick darkness or in a burning bush. Sometimes 
- he seems to dwell among the cherubim of the ark. Sometimes 
‘he almost seems identical with the ark itself. He is in magic 
_ fashion dangerous to his worshippers. To touch the ark, or 
“to break through unto the Lord to gaze’? was fatal. In other 
accounts he lives on Mount Seir and comes forth thence to battle. 
Afterwards he chooses Mount Sion for his habitation, and from 
Sion the prophet Amos declares that he would roar and utter 
his voice from Jerusalem .® 

_ As a human personality he is half a barbaric chief, half an 
Oriental despot, superhuman like the gods of Polytheism, be- 
cause greater and more powerful than man, but no ideal as to 
his moral attributes; a jealous God, as he describes himself, 
capable of punishing the children for the fathers, according to 
the barbaric principle of collective responsibility ; occasionally 
on the point of doing rash things, from which Moses, his Grand 
Vizier, with difficulty restrains him—asking him to consider 
what people will say, and representing that if he destroys his 
nation, others will ascribe it not to his want of will, but to his 
want of power to preserve them.* He is certainly from the first 
' the God of Righteousness in the sense that he is the source and 
upholder of the law. But it is the law of a barbaric people, and 
a warlike race—a law with all the features of early group-morality 
and with some of them unpleasingly exaggerated. Yahveh is 
aman of war. He allows and even insists on the total destruc- 
tion of the Canaanities. Agag is put to death before him. His 
favoured David smites every male in Edom, and puts the men 
of Rabbah under saws and harrows of iron.’ His code recog- 
nizes the blood feud, vengeance for unintentional homicide, and 
vicarious responsibility. But if barbaric, the code has, as we 
have seen in detail, many of the best features of early morality. 
A strong sense of social solidarity is shown in the care taken for 
the cause of the poor, the fatherless and the widow, in the pro- 
hibition of usury, in the protection of the Hebrew slave and 
concubine, in the cities of refuge to shelter from the fury of the 
avenger of blood. The ethics of early Yahvism, in fact, exhibit 

1 See Montefiore, p. 42. 

2 Exodus xix. 21. Cf. Montefiore, p. 39. 3 Amos i. 2. 

4 See the dialogue between God and Moses, Numbers xiv. 11-25. God 
having declared that He will smite the people, Moses replies, “‘ Then the 
Egyptians shall hear it”. . . and “‘ the nations which have heard the fame 
of Thee will speak, saying, Because the Lord was not able to bring this 
people into the land which he sware unto them, therefore he hath slain 
them in the wilderness.”’ 


5 2 Samuel xii. 31. On Yahvism as exemplified in the story of David, 
seo Kuenen, Religion of Israel, vol. i. p. 326 ff. 


492 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


group-morality in its typical form with its best as well as some 


of its worst features standing out in strong relief. 


2. Such was the religion which was transformed by the labours — 


of the prophets from the eighth century onwards into a spiritual 
worship of one God, the creator and ruler of all things, the God 
of social justice, of mercy, and finally of love. It is not necessary 
for our purpose to follow the steps by which the new religious 
ideal was slowly and painfully acauired, with many backslidings 
and reversions to lower types of thought. It will be sufficient 
to point out the leading ideas which indicate the spirituality of 
the new religion. The first of these, both in point of time and 
perhaps in ethical significance, was the protest against the belief 
that sacrifice could_atone for sin. This is the ever-recurring 
theme of the older prophets. “‘I hate, I despise your feasts, 
and I will take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Yea, 
though ye offer Me your burnt offerings and meal offerings, I 
will not accept them: neither will I regard the peace offerings 
of your fat beasts. . . . But let judgment roll down as waters, 
and righteousness as a mighty stream.’’! So writes the first of 
the prophetic line. Isaiah takes up the word: “To what pur- 
pose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto Me? saith the Lord : 
Iam full of the burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts ; 
and I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he- 
goats.’’2 “‘ And when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide 
Mine eyes from you: yea, when ye make many prayers, I will 
not hear: your hands are full of blood. Wash you, make you 
clean; put away the evil of your doings from before Mine eyes ; 
cease to do evil: learn to do well: seek judgment, relieve the 
oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.”? This 
is the first lesson of spiritual religion which finally culminates 
in the doctrine that God is a Spirit, and they who worship him 
must worship him in spirit and in truth. In the lowest stage 
of ethical thought men washed away their sins with magic purges 
or swore them off with incantation formulas. In the next stage 
they bargained with the gods and offered a bull or ram, or in 
extremity their own children to make up for their iniquity. The 
ethical stage proper begins when these childish things are put 
aside, and men conceive God as caring neither for gifts nor for 
ceremonial adulation, but for repentance and change of heart. 
fspiritual.religion must be a religion of the inner man. The 
ceremonies lose their magical effect. "The true religious mystery 
1 Amos v.21. “2 Isaiah i. 11. 
3 Loe. ctt., 16-17. Cf, Jer. vii. 5, etc. 


MONOTHEISM 493 


Us found-in_what passes within man’s mind. ‘‘ Circumcise there- 
fore the foreskin of your heart,” say the prophets and the 
- prophetic code! Yet in the older prophets it is rather social 
righteousness and social salvation than the justification of the 
individual that occupy the first place. While nearly all later 
religions have appealed in the first instance to the individual 
to come to God and save his soul, leaving social righteousness 
to a secondary place, the prophets, innocent as yet of any doc- 
trine of resurrection, believing in temporal rewards and con- 
cerned above all for the fate of Israel, put matters in a different 
order. ‘Their righteousness is emphatically a social righteous- 
ness. We can trace in it the protest of a just and wise conser- 
vatism against the so-called progress of a material civilization 
with its tendency to break down the position of the poorer free 
men and enslave them to the masters of wealth. The prophets’ 
teaching was hardly yet humanitarian. It was rather an in- 
tensified form of group-morality. But it was for justice and 
equality, forbearance and consideration, as between all members 
of the group constituted as such by God’s choice. It is God’s 
people who are being oppressed. ‘What mean ye that ye 
crush My people and grind the face of the poor? saith the Lord, 
the Lord of Hosts.”’? The tyranny of the monopolist is already 
felt and denounced with a power that has never been surpassed. 
** Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, 
till there be no room, and ye be made to dwell alone in the midst 
of the land.”? ‘‘The Lord will enter into judgment with the 
elders of His people and the princes thereof: it is ye that have 
eaten up the vineyard : the spoil of the poor is in your houses.’’* 
All the vices of material civilization, wine-bibbing and luxury, 
feminine vanity and ostentation, are denounced in the same 
strain,° and the women are threatened with branding instead of 
beauty, and instead of a stomacher a girding of sackcloth. 
These were not empty denunciations. The emancipation of 
slaves in the sabbatical year * with provision to enable them 
to start as free men, the prohibition of usury in dealing with 
fellow Hebrews, the wiping out of debts in the sabbatical year, 
the abolition of vicarious punishment, the limitation of blood 
revenge, the provision for the fatherless and widows, the in- 
culcation of humanity to slaves male and female, are embodied 
1 Deut. x. 16. 2 Isaiah iii. 15. 3 Isaiah v. 8. 
¢ Isaiah iii. 14. 5 4b, 16-26; v. 8-12. 
6 I have referred above (Part I. chap. vii.) to Jeremiah’s account of the 
attempts to enforce this rule (Jeremiah xxxiv. 8 ff.). The writer of Isaiah 


Iviii. 6 insists on letting the oppressed go free, presumably meaning the 
emancipation of slaves. 


494 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


in the prophetic code and represent perhaps the earliest conscious 
effort towards systematic social reform, marred only by the 
exclusive religious spirit, which still (notwithstanding the con- 
cern for the stranger that is within the gates) draws a deep line 
between Jew and Gentile, emphasizes the necessity of exter- 
minating the heathen, and proscribes the heretic. The heads 
of the code are summed up in the chapter in which Ezekiel 
repudiates the doctrine of vicarious responsibility. 


“ But if a man be just, and do that which is lawful and right, 
and hath not eaten upon the mountains, neither hath lifted up 
his eyes to the idols of the house of Israel, neither hath defiled 
his neighbour’s wife, neither hath come near to a woman in her 
separation; and hath not wronged any, but hath restored to the 
debtor his pledge, hath spoiled none by violence, hath given his 
bread to the hungry, and hath covered the naked with a garment ; 
he that hath not given forth upon usury, neither hath taken 
any increase, that hath withdrawn his hand from iniquity, hath 
executed true judgment between man and man, hath walked in 
My statutes, and hath kept My judgments, to deal truly; he is 
just, he shall surely live, saith the Lord God.” + 


For a reformed and renovated Israel the prophets at first 
foresaw a reward of inner peace and prosperity. But as troubles 
thickened around them they began to feel that suffering might 
have a necessity and a value of its own. God’s servant is ‘ de- 
spised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted 
with grief: and as one from whom men hide their face he was 
despised, and we esteemed him not.” It is the destiny of the 
teacher to bear the burden of the world’s folly and sin and to 
bear it with nothing but contempt for his reward. “Surely he 
hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows : yet we did esteem 
him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded 
for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the 
chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes 
we are healed.” ? His methods are those of gentleness and 
peace. ‘ He shall not cry, nor lift up, nor cause his voice to be 
heard in the street. A bruised reed shall he not break, and the 
smoking flax shall he not quench : he shall bring forth judgment 
in truth.”? He bears his sufferings in silence and humility. 
*“He was oppressed, yet he humbled himself and opened not 
his mouth; as a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and as a 
‘sheep that before her shearers is dumb; yea, he opened not 
his mouth.” * Thus by a very different road and with much 

1 Ezekiel xviii. 5-9. 2 Isaiah liii. 4, 5. 
3 Isaiah xlii. 2, 3. 4 Isaiah liii. 7. 


MONOTHEISM 495 


difference of implied meaning, we are reaching the Buddhist 
doctrine of renunciation and humility—those cardinal points of 
_ Spiritualized religion. 

Further, in proportion as Yahveh became the God of the 
whole earth the old group-morality was compelled to yield in a 
measure to Universalism. The warrior’s song is changed to a 
prophecy of peace. ‘‘ And He shall judge between the nations, 
and shall reprove many peoples : and they shall beat their swords 
into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation 
shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn 
war any more.”! In its cruder form the idea was that other 
nations should take their teaching from Jerusalem.2, Vengeance, 
moreover, is still freely denounced on public enemies. ‘“ The 
Assyrian... . shall flee from the sword and his young men shall 
become tributary.” * The exilic writers declare that the children 
of Babylon shall be dashed against the stones. But though 
national redemption and glory are still prominent we reach a 
higher phase in the conception of a redeemed Israel which is to 
evangelize the world. Unfortunately, the experiences of the 
Exile and return were not favourable to the further development 
of thought along these lines, and there is a certain reaction 
towards exclusive particularism in the Priestly Code. Judaism 
feared to lose itself in the great world from which it was separated 
by no political barrier, and it sought safety in drawing its skirts 
closely round it, and even avoiding all contact with the unclean. 
One of the noblest traits of Monotheism was thus corrupted. 
Universalism survived only in kindness to the stranger and in 
the effort to proselytize, and even this was a matter of con- 
troversy.’ Nor was the question finally determined within the 
limits of Judaism itself, nor until the age of Paul. 

Yet the unity and omnipresence and goodness of God are by 
this time established. The early prophets do not hesitate to 
attribute vengeance and even deceit to Yahveh. “Shall evil 
befall a city, and the Lord hath not done it ?’”’ Amos asks.8 In 
the Deutero-Isaiah God declares that it is He who makes peace 
and creates evil.2 This belongs, no doubt, to the conception of 


1 Isaiah ii. 4. Dr. Carpenter informs me that the passage is now gener- 
ally regarded as post-exilic. 

2 Zech. viii. 20-23. 3 Isaiah xxxi. 8. 

* Isaiah xiii. 16. Cf. Psalm cxxxvii. 9. 

5 Montefiore, pp. 273-277. Yet Cyrus is also God’s instrument. 

§ 4b., p. 340. 

? That is to say, so far as the official religion is concerned. The univer- 
salist tendency is maintained in some of the Psalms, in Jonah, and in the 
Wisdom literature. 

§ Amos ili. 6. ® Isaiah xlv. 7. 


- Sse 


496 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


divine punishment for transgression. It is going a step further 
however, when Ezekiel maintains that in punishment for the 
idolatry of the people God gave them statutes which were not 
good and judgments wherein they should not live. At a later 
stage, on the contrary, we find the authorship of evil imputed 
to Satan. In the Chronicles it is he, not Yahveh, who incites 
David to the numbering of the people. If in this we trace the 
influence of Zoroastrian ideas we may recognize also an attempt 
to keep pure the notion of God’s goodness and to separate him 
from all responsibility for sin and suffering. God’s unity and 
omnipresent power are no less distinct than his righteousness. 
Jeremiah already puts the question, “Am I a God at hand and 
not a God afar off?’’—a question to which more primitive 
worshippers would have returned a very doubtful answer. ‘“* Do 
I not fill heaven and earth?’’1 After the exile, though God 
still in some sense, symbolical or other, dwells in Sion and is 
certainly in a peculiar sense the God of Israel, yet there is no 
more talk of separation from him, whether by exile or by death. 
‘Tf I climb up into heaven, Thou art there; if I go down into 
hell, Thou art there also.”’ God was the creator and father of 
all, though all men were not yet brothers. 

Such was the adolescence of Monotheism. We have now to 
deal with its full development and endeavour to measure its 
main contributions to ethical thought—that is to say, to the 
guidance of life. 


3. The central idea of Ethical Monotheism admits of a short 
and simple statement. There is one God only, the Maker of 
heaven and earth. He is a Personal God, and in his personality 
there is a touch of kinship with our human nature. But he 
does not, like the gods of polytheism, differ from us merely in 
being greater, wiser, and more powerful. He is not—when the 
adolescence of monotheism is past-—-a mere magnified man. 
For man is finite and he is infinite, eternal, without beginning 
or end of days, the source and sustaining cause of all that is. 
Again, man is of composite nature and therefore corrupt. God 
is pure Spirit, and the spiritual is now the comprehensive ex- 
pression for the highest and best that is known to man. It is 
defined negatively by opposition to the earthly, positively by 
the exaltation of morality into perfect purity of heart. Godisa 


1 Jeremiah xxiil. 23-24. Yet, in Ezekiel’s time, people remaining in 
Canaan still taunt the exiles with being “far from Yahveh,” and boast 
‘unto us is Yahveh’s land given’’ (Montefiore, p. 207, citing Ezekiel 
0/5). 


MONOTHEISM 497 


Spirit, and his communion with man is spiritual. They that 
worship him must worship him in spirit, and forms and cere- 
-monies are naught without the inward and spiritual grace given 

unto usin them. As the Eternal Spirit God is the founder 
and sustainer of the Ethical order, he punishes the wicked and 
rewards the good, and yet—again except in the crassest appre- 
hension—goodness cannot be assumed for the sake of the reward, 
for so it would not, spiritually considered, be goodness. What 
must win God is the genuine turning of the heart to him, a faith 
in him, which is also in the highest monotheism a love for him 
from whom flows love to man, and in this love is the beginning 
and the end of human virtue. Finally, though man’s corruption 
separates him by a great gulf from the infinite perfection of 
God, yet with a mercy that equals his justice God has him- 
self appointed means whereby the gulf may be spanned and 
forgiveness of sins obtained. 

This comparatively simple conception in which the ethical 
and the religious fuse, which provides at once for the govern- 
ment of the universe and the entire direction of human life, 
expresses what religion has in essence meant to great numbers 
of devout souls. But the conception could not maintain itself 
in so simple a form. At every point it bristles with theoretical 
difficulties, to meet which great structures of dogma have been 
erected, modified, and replaced by others, as the needs of con- 
troversy have determined. Nor was the shape taken by dogma 
determined by the pure monotheistic idea alone, but in large 
measure by the particular contents of the historical documents 
in which the monotheistic system was revealed. We have to 
note the fundamental points in which the building up of dogma 
affected ethics. 

First,.as.to_ the nature of God and his relation-to-the.world, 
monotheism in all its forms appears. to be agreed that he is the 
mncreated, unconditionedcreator. and.sustainer of all things. 

“He is God alone! 
God the Eternal ! 


He begets not and is not begotten ! 
Nor is there like unto Him any one!’’! 


But for one clause this Mohammedan hymn of unity might be 
sung with equal fervour by the Christian. So, again, another 
passage— 

“ God, there is no God but He, the living, the self-subsistent. 
Slumber takes Him not, nor sleep. He is what is in the heavens 


1 The Chapter of Unity. The Koran, vol. ii. chap. cxii. (Palmer’s Tr.). 
KK 


498 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


and what is in the earth. Who is it that intercedes with Him, 
saves by His permission? He knows what is before them and 
what behind them, and they comprehend not aught of His know- 
ledge but of what He pleases. His throne extends over the 
heavens and the earth, and it tires Him not to guard them both, 
for He is high and orand. os 


God is the creator and sustainer of things. But according as 


emphasis is laid on the one or the other of these descriptions, 
divergent views of his relation to the world come into being. 
As creator he makes the world out of nothing, and he makes 
man in hisimage. He endows his creatures with existence and 
they become in a manner separate from him. If pressed hard 
this conception militates against God’s infinitude. Man and the 
world are separate from him, and in so far as they have inde- 
pendent existences must be held to limit him. He is no longer 
all that is. Upon this line of thought he becomes a Ruler, all- 
powerful, no doubt, but still an outside power acting upon this 
earthly existence. On the other hand, as Sustainer of all that 
is his relation to the world becomes more intimate. It is only 
in him that things have existence. His will alone is the cause 
of all that happens. He alone has independent existence and 
the things of the world exist only by participation in him.? 
This line of thought, it is clear, is bringing us close to Pantheism,? 
and though thinkers as orthodox as Thomas Aquinas have made 
no small advances in that direction, the centre of gravity of 
Moonotheistic dogma lies nearer to the creationist conception. 


( ‘God made the world, but he is not the world: He made 


b/ 


\ 


¥ 


) man, but is not man. In so far his Being is limited. He is 
la transcendent, not immanent.* 


1 Koran, chap. ii. (Palmer’s Tr., vol. i. p. 40). These passages express 
God’s power rather than his love and other moral qualities. But these 
appear in their place. Palmer finds ninety-nine epithets of God in the 
Koran, including The Merciful, Ruler, Holy, Peace, Faithful, Protector, 
Mighty, Creator, Forgiver, Provider, Knowing, Honourer, Destroyer, 
Hearer, Seer, Judge, Justice, Subtle, Aware, Forgiving, Exalted, Generous, 
Answerer of Prayer, Comprehensive, Wise, Loving, Glorious, Truth, Sub- 
sisting, Eternal, the First, the Last, Righteousness, the Relenting, Kind, 
Lord of Majesty and Liberality, Equitable, Patient. 

2 “* Participatione ejus, qui solum per se ipsum est.’” Thomas, quoted 
in Harnack, History of Dogma, E. T., vol. vi. p. 184. 

3 “ Theological theories have varied all the way from deism to a view 
little removed from pantheism’’ (Adams Brown, Christian Theology im 
Outline, p. 215). 

4 “* Against Pantheism Christianity affirms the distinction ” between God 
and the world (Adams Brown, op. c?i., p. 198). Yet God seems to be the 
Absolute and the Ultimate Reality (op. cit., p. 122), and it is most natural 
to think of creation in terms of the relation between phenomena and their 
spiritual ground (op. czt., p. 214). One cannot but ask (a) Are phenomena 


MONOTHEISM 499 


4. So far the interest is speculative rather than ethical. 


Whichever view is taken, the unconditional omnipotence of 
God at the outset is assumed. But with this assumption the 


_ problem of evil at once becomes urgent, and we touch the very 


heart of all ethico-religious theory. The Platonic doctrine that. 
God is good, and _as good can be the author of no evil, may be 
regar he corner-stone-of-all-ethical réligion. ‘How was 


this to be fitted in with the dogma of omnipotence which mono- 
theism had accepted? Broadly speaking, there were two pos- 


sible methods. The first was to deny the reality of evil, the 
second was to insist on the absolute right of the Creator to do 


what He would with His own. Both explanations have held an 
important placeindogma. According to Augustine, evil has no 
positive and substantial existence. It is only “a privation of 
good,’’1 or, by a swift change of thought, it is the dark colour 


that throws up the light. ‘For as a picture with dark colour, 


set in its proper place, is fair, so is the universe of things, if one 
can behold it, even with its sinners, though they, considered Ly 
themselves, are stained by their own ugliness.” ? It is well to 


‘remark that these two views are in essence quite opposed. In 
the one, evil has no positive character. It is a void, where good 
“might be, but is not. In the other, there are things or persons 


that are evil in themselves—evil is so far positive; but their 
badness when viewed in connection with the whole scheme of 
things is held to have a good effect —a function to perform 
whereby the picture as a whole is made more fair. 

The optimistic doctrine that the evil of the world is merely 
the dark colour which serves to show up the bright would be 
tenable upon two hypotheses. If evil and good were so dis- 
tributed that physical suffering, external calamities and moral 
wrong-doing played an essential part in the growth of each 
personality, and could be shown to tend ultimately to its greatcr 
perfection, the existence of evil would be reconcilable with a 


divine justice which should take every personality into account. 


{ 


Equally, if personality were left wholly out of account, it might 
be theoretically maintainable that the unequal distribution of 
evil in the world was a matter of no moment, provided that the 
whole scheme of things be allowed to be sound at the core. 
The second alternative was not possible for any system which 








real? Ifso, we havea dualism; (6) Are they an imperfect expression of the 
underlying Real which is God? If so, have we not Pantheism ? 

+ De Cwitate Dei, Book XI. chap. xxii.: “Cum omnino natura nulla sit 
malum, nomenque hoc non sit nisi ee anis boni.’ 

2 16., chap. xxiii. 


500 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


took account of personality at all. In particular, so far as re- 
gards moral evil, it was not open to Christian apologists, who, 
on the one hand, maintained the infinite value of the individual 
soul, and, on the other, visited the reprobate with the prospect 
of eternal punishment. Evil which involves eternal suffering 
as its punishment cannot be dismissed as something merely 
negative, nor yet accepted as a mere incident in the working 
out of a higher order—that is to say, it cannot be so accepted 
by those who maintain the inherent worth of personality. 
Hence theologians are driven back on a second line of defence. 

Chey admit the evil will to exist, but they seek to exonerate the 
Deity for responsibility for its existence. The simplest method 
of such exoneration is that of Pelagius, which makes the salva- 
tion of man depend upon his own choice, that choice not being 
conceived as predetermined by God. Free will, thus under- 
stood, however, is clearly a limitation of the divine omnipotence, 
aud theology, Christian and Mohammedan alike, has often been 
driven to prefer the opposite alternative of limiting the responsi- 
bility of man rather than the knowledge and authority of God. 
Yet this alternative raises many problems, some of them of 
grave ethical import. In the first place, how does the evil will 
come into existence? Augustine is clear that a good God can- 
not create a bad nature. The nature of the wicked angels, 
therefore was intrinsically good,? and “‘we must believe the 
providence of the Creator rather than be so rash as to condemn 
any part of the world’s fabric of any imperfection.’ The nature 
of the wicked angels being good, their fall arose from their evil 
will. What then, we naturally ask, was the cause of this evil 
will, seeing that evil was not in their own nature? The answer 
is that the evil will has no cause. 


“Seek the cause of this evil will and you shall find just none, 
for what can cause the will’s evil, the will being sole cause of all 
evil— Cum ipsa (voluntas) faciat opus malum —The evil will, 
therefore, causes evil works, but nothing causes the evil will.’’ 4 


But_at_this pointwe.are—at—onee.brought to the free will 
dilemma. Either the bad will must have an origin somewhere 
in that structure of things which God has created, or it must be 


1 De Civitate Der, Book XI. chap. xxii., xxiii. ; Book XII. chap. i. 





2 Op. cit., xii. chaps. i.and iii. “‘ Inquantum nature sunt, bone sunt.”’ 
7 9Ds, Book XII. chap. iv. The free rendering of the old trans- 
lator J. H. Tho Latin is: “‘rectissime credenda precipitur providentia 


Conditoris ne tanti artificis opus in aliquo reprehendere vanitate humane 
temeritatis audeamus.”’ 
4 2b., Book XII. chap. vi., J. H.’s Tr. In the Latin the last words are : 
“ male autem voluntatis efficiens est nihil.” 
} 


pe 


MONOTHEISM 501 


a force arising per impossibile out of nothing,-whieh-the-Creator~ 


“does not-control. It may be said that he does not control it, 


— 
. 


but only permitsit. “This does not offer escape from the dilemma, 
either that it is a force arising somehow independently of him, 
or that his permission is a negative condition whereby alone this 
force can have any effect. No theory of responsibility can, from 
the ethical point of view, draw any serious distinction between 
a negative and a positive condition, and to permit evil, in the 
plenitude of power that might prevent it, is all one with the 
doing of evil. In point of fact, Augustine’s own argument, when 


| looked into, tends to restore the omnipotence of God along with 


his responsibility ; for although he denies that the evil will has 
an origin, he is strenuous in maintaining that the good will is 
created, and here he refuses to make any distinction between 
the will and the being to whom the will belongs, for he argues,} 
‘ Seeing that the angels themselves were created, how can their 
wills but be so also ?”’ It might be retorted that if this argument 
applies to the good angels, it applies also to the bad ones. But, 
further, Augustine himself is in the end led to the admission 
that the difference between the bad and the good will rests upon 
the choice of good, and the choice of good upon the grace of God. 
Those angels “‘that were created good and yet became evil by 
their proper will either received less grace from the divine love 
than they that persisted therein, or if they had equal good at 
their creation, the one fell by the evil wills, and the other, having 
further help, attained that bliss from which they were sure never 
to fall.”’? At this point, then, the whole argument becomes 
consistent, but at the cost of deliberately accepting one horn of 
the dilemma. The good will is good because he who exercises 
it has a greater measure of grace; the bad will is bad because 
grace does not sufficiently abound. This isin essence to abandon 
the conception of the bad will arising uncaused, as a force external 
to the providence of God, and to maintain the superintendence 
of God throughout; but it is also, by a logical necessity, to 
constitute God the ultimate author of the moral depravity of the 
wicked angels, and, on the same argument, of wicked man.?_ In 

1 De Civitate Dei, Book XII. chap.ix. 7? 7b., Book. XII. ch.ix. J. H.’s Tr. 

3 Augustine attempts to escape from the positive character of the evil 
will by treating it as a deficiency in goodness (xii. 7). The want of 
sufficiently good will does not touch the question of responsibility. If one 
person’s will is adequate to maintain the goodness of his nature while 
another person’s will fails in that respect, the difference must be due to one 
of two causes. The want of will in the man who becomes bad is either 
something that arises independently without the appointment of God, or it 
is something which God foresees and appoints, and we are back in precisely 
the old dilemma. 


| 


502 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


fact, the determination to hold by the omnipotence of God at all 
costs led inevitably to the doctrine of predestination, for if God. 
knows all things from the first, how can he but know the fate of 


those whom he is about to create or whom he may create at any 


future time, and if he creates them, knowing their fate, what 
theory of responsibility can be invented which shall take the 
burden of their fate off him? True, their reprobation may still 
be regarded as the consequence of their own wickedness. But 
wickedness also is foreknown by God, and though that wickedness 
issues from the will of each individual, yet precisely the same 
argument applies to the will itself; that also is foreknown and 
foreappointed. Thus, though by various dialectical compro- 
mises theologians may still endeavour to attribute foreknowledge 
of sin without responsibility for sin, the far more logical con- 
sequence is that drawn by Calvin when he declares that those 
‘“whom God passes by He reprobates, and from no other cause 
than His determination to exclude them.” 1 And again, “I in- 
quire again, how it came to pass that the fall of Adam, inde- 
pendent of any remedy, should involve so many nations with 
their infant children in eternal death, but because such was the 
will of God. . . . It is an awful decree, I confess; but no one 
can deny that God foreknew the future final fate of man before 
He created him, and that He did foreknow it because it was 
appointed by His own decree.’’? As to the distinction between 
will and permission Calvin admits that it is nugatory. ‘* What 
reason shall we assign for His permitting it, but because it is 
His will?’ Thus, the strict insistence upon the omnipotence 
of God led theologians, in proportion to their logical courage, 
to a doctrine which did not, indeed, abolish the human will, be- 
cause the will was the instrument through which God worked, 
but which did place upon God the final responsibility for all 
that exists in this world and all that man does therein, and all 
that in consequence man shall enjoy or suffer hereafter. And 
this, in accordance with views held to be derived from the 
original revelation—though utterly repugnant to the true spirit 
of Christianity—involved, among other things, the eternal 
suffering in unspeakable torments of the vast majority of man- 
kind, of that mankind for whose benefit in the main God was 
nevertheless held to have created the world. 
If we would know-the-ethical principle_by-which- this-schenreé 
of things can be justified,-we.can again turn to the logical Calvin, 
in whom we find the consequences most-thoroughly ushed home. 
We merit punishment because we are oor by sin, and if 
“FCalvin, 1. 141. ; mans 240., p. 147 


MONOTHEISM 503 


_ 


saw it would tend to the justification and glory of his name. 
With the admission that in order to understand the justice of the 
scheme of God we must understand him to constitute justice 
as suits him, we have, in point of fact, passed outside the range 
of human ethics. We have admitted that ethical conceptions, 
as we understand them, no longer apply, and Calvin himself 
allows that the destruction of mankind is guided by an equity 
indubitable, yet unknown to us. The Deity lays down an ideal 
code for man, but the code which men ascribe to the Deity is 
not ideal and can only be excused as being unintelligible to the 
human mind.? At this stage the ethical and religious elements, 
the blending of which was the triumph of monotheism, definitely 
fall asunder once more; and those who will not face this schism 
find themselves compelled to make some room for human re- 
sponsibility, and to conceive a will which is not a mere puppet 
of an overruling Providence. 


5. While limiting by implication the omnipotence of God, 
the “doctrine of Free Will is not without ethical difficulties of 


1 Calvin, pp. 142-148. 

At this point in theological development we come by a long round to 
the arbitrariness of the Mohammedan Deity. ‘‘ God’s is what is in Heaven 
and in the earth, and if ye show what is in your souls, or hide it, God will 
call you to account; and He forgives whom He will and punishes whom 
He will, for God is mighty over all” (Koran, vol. i. chap. il. p. 45). Com- 
pare page 62, where, however, the concluding words run: ‘“ For God is 
forgiving and merciful.’”’ Forgiveness may be the portion of any but the 
idolaters, but they were created for hell. ‘‘ Had God pleased they would 
not have associated aught with Him ”’ (Koran, i. chap. vi. p. 128), 7. e. would 
not have worshipped false gods. But “‘ we have created for hell many of 

the ginn and of mankind. They have hearts and they discern not there- 
with; they have eyes and they see not therewith; they have ears and they 
hear not therewith; they are like cattle, nay, they go more astray; these 
it is who care not”’ (chap. vii, p. 160). These men God predestines to the 
fire, and the believers are not to intercede for them. But as to whether He 
will save all believers who avoid sin, it does not seem so clear. He is for- 
giving and merciful, but he is also an oriental despot in whom there remains 
an incalculable element of caprice. 

This view, it need hardly be said, is repudiated by modern scientific 
theology, which substitutes for the retaliatory a disciplinary view of punish- 
ment, and tends, if a little hesitatingly, to a doctrine of ultimate universal 
salvation (ep. Adams Brown, op. cit., pp. 293 seq.). 

2 Calvin, 11. 148. 


504 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


‘its own. Will either is or is not an expression of character. 


If it is an expression of character, it figures-but-as-onelink i in, 
the endless chain of causes and effects. We may trace this 
chain back in the first instance to the original nature of the in- 
dividual, and whether we say that this is determined by heredity 
or was what God made it, we are equally throwing the responsi- 
bility back on to something anterior to the individual, and on 
the creationist principle this something must in the end be 
God himself. If, on the other hand, we deny that will is an 
expression of character, we not only assert something which is 
in itself unintelligible, but we in reality destroy the very re- 
sponsibility which we are seeking to maintain. For responsi- 
bility ceases when identity of character ceases. A man is justly 
rewarded or punished for what he has done only so far as he can 
recognize himself as the doer. If the “I’’ who did the deed 
is the “I” which suffers for it, well and good. But this “I” 
is the permanent self with its abiding character, and punishment 
has full ethical justification only so far as it tends to purge and 
ennoble the character. Thus, if the theory of Free Will means 
that it is not this self that does the deed, but a Will which springs 
out of no antecedent cause and has no fixed relation to what the 
“TI” has been or will be, then it is not the “ I ’’—the permanent 
selfi—that has sinned, and to punish it will be of no avail.t 
Punishment is reduced to a blind retaliation on the body which 
the Will possesses, and the Will itself is reduced to the condition 
of an animistic spirit which enters a man from without and 
works its will for a while with his limbs. 

1 Thus, the man who is punished must be essentially the same being as 
he who did the deed. That is to say, justice and responsibility, ethically 
conceived, imply the persistent identity of the personality. But this per- 
sistent identity is precisely that which the Free Will doctrine in the stage 
now under consideration attempts to deny. Itis not the “‘ I,” the trend of 
continuous connection running through all my conscious life, the subject 
which thinks and feels and knows—it is not that ““I’’ which acts. For 
this “‘I”’ has its definite character, modifiable, no doubt, by circumstances 
and developed by its own reaction upon circumstances, capable of being 
appealed to by an infinite variety of motives and often assimilating new © 
purposes, but nevertheless always the same “I,’’ the character of which 
at any given moment arises out of its previous state. It is not this “ 1a 
but a Will that acts, a Will that comes from nowhere and stands in no 
certain relation to me. This Will is not by the terms of the argument 
what “‘I” was before the act was done. Why, then, do “I” take the 
praise or bear the blame of the deed ? 

The doctrine of the Undetermined Will, in short, destroys the moral 
responsibility which it sets out to establish. Moral responsibility infers 
(1) continuous identity of character, and (2) the determination of action 
by motives adopted 1 in accordance with the character of the agent. This 


implies ‘‘ free will’ in the sense that the agent must be unconstrained by 
any force outside himself, never in the sense that he is free from himself 


: MONOTHEISM 505 
( 
| Furthermore, on either conception of Free Will the ultimate 
responsibility of the Creator for evil remains» Sorrow “arid 
suffering do not begin -with the-Fall, or if any theologian attri- 
_butes them to the sin of Adam and Eve in the spirit of the curse 
im Genesis, he is merely bringing us~back to the doctrine’ of 
Vicarious guilt. Even if all evil resulted from the wicked will” 
of man, yet it-is.God who made man and gave him-freedom ~ 
to actas he would. ‘Thus, though omnipotence is limited, its 
responsibility is not abrogated.1. The conception of Free Will 
alone could not solve the difficulty. But taken in conjunction 
with a more rational theory of the function of punishment it has 
suggested a different method of approach. It was, above all, 
the doctrine of eternal punishment which converted the difficul- 
ties arising from God’s foreknowledge and unlimited power into 
ethical impossibilities. This doctrine is, of course, not essential 
‘to Monotheism; it conflicts with the moral teaching of the 
Gospels ; and with the growth of a more refined ethics it has, in 
fact, fallen into the background. Apologetics have then to cope 
with the evils, moral and physical, of this world, and their 
tendency would seem to be towards an “‘ educative ”’ conception. 
' Free Will is higher than instinct. He only can be a morally 
_good man who is physically and psychologically capable of being 
“morally bad, for “‘ ought ’’ implies “‘can,”’ and it is only 
‘“* when a soul has seen 
By dint of evil that good is best,” 
that it can enter into spiritual rest. In no other way could a 
moral order come into being, or could man be made god-like. 
1 The doctrine of the dependence of responsibility upon character has 
inherent consequences which are carefully to be marked off from those 
which follow from theories of creation or of the nature of causation with 
which it may be associated. Moral responsibility implies the dependence 
of action upon the self with its definite character, and, since the self does 
not arise out of nothing, its character, and therefore its conduct, must at 
the next remove be referable to the conditions out of which the self arose. 
Following this line of thought we are forced to conceive of Reality as a 
single system of which all the parts are interconnected. The argument 
does not imply that this interconnection is of a mechanical character. On 
the contrary—so far as it consists in psychical operations working intel- 
ligently towards clearly conceived ends, as is the case at least in human 
actions—these are the opposite of mechanical. Nor, again, does the argu- 
ment imply that any intelligent being foresaw and planned the whole. 
If either of these creeds are held, they are held on other grounds. What 
the argument goes to prove is that Reality is a single system of inter- 
dependent parts. What kind of system it is must be discovered from 
other sources. It is only when taken in conjunction with the belief in an 
all-knowing and all-powerful Creator that this doctrine gives rise to 
the ethical] difficulties of Predestination, and only when combined with 


a materialistic view of the universe that it destroys responsibility and 
renders human purposes an illusion. 


506 MORALS IN EVOLUTION | 


As with moral evil, so with the pain and suffering inherent in 
the order of nature. Sorrow exists that man may learn to bear 
it. The happiness of childish innocence is sweet, but not so 
worthy as the peace won for itself by the strong soul resting 
upon God. To strive is the law of life, and its suffering is the 
pang of travail. God might create a happy paradise for children 
at play, but he could not, without implanting seeds of suffering, 
produce the nobler race of strong men to be conquerors of the 
earth. It seems, indeed, impossible to state this explanation 
except in terms which condition the creative power of God. It 
may be that to strive and fall, to endure suffering in ourselves 
and even the sight of it in those whom we love, is an unavoidable 
condition of moral growth, but if this is so, it is as much as 
to say that there are laws and conditions in the spiritual world 
which omnipotence itself cannot infringe. Unconditioned crea- 
tion is thus in principle denied, and for an omnipotent Dis- 
poser we are compelled to substitute the evolutionary concep- 
tion of a Spirit striving in the world of experience with the 
inherent conditions of its own growth and mastering them at 
the cost of all the blood that stains the pages of history, and all 
the unremembered tears that bedew the lone desert places of 
the heart.t 


6. Amid all. metaphysical.difficulties monotheism™remaims= 
clear as to the basis of the ethical order. God’s Will is the _ 
_source..of moral obligation, his Word the revelation of — the 
_practical rule of life. The fulfilment of his Will is the means” 


of salvation;atid-salvation.is propounded. -as-the supreme end of _ 
life towards which every thought and act must be directed. The 
order of éthical ideas springing from this principle has its own 
definite features, which must now be considered. 


1 Cf. Adams Brown, op. cit., pp. 207-209, who, however, in fear of limiting 
the divine omnipotence, and rightly rejecting indeterminism, leans rather 
to the view that sin itself is a part of the divine plan as a means to the 
experience of salvation. That a limited spiritual power might be driven 
to this method as the only one available would be a thesis at least in- 
volving no contradiction, but that omnipotence could not achieve its 
ends without the tortures of Torquemada is a meaningless proposition. 
What, moreover, is the actual consciousness of a man who, having 
sinned, believes that in so doing he was fulfilling the will of God? How 
can he at the same time feel that he is estranged from God and requires 
reconciliation ? 

The difficulties of Theism only become contradictions when its defenders 
insist upon omnipotence. Yet we still find writers as open-minded as 
Prof. Adams Brown insisting that ‘‘ There is no doctrine which is 
practically more important than that of the divine omnipotence” (op. 
cit., p.4117). 


MONOTHEISM 507 


' God being on the one hand a perfect Being, on the other the 
all-powerful Lord of all, all wrong-doing takes upon itself the 
character of a sin against him. Sin is an act of rebellion against 
a supreme authority, and it stamps the soul with a stain of guilt 
which makes it unworthy to appear in the divine presence. Sin, 
in fact, borrows something of the infinitude of the Being against 
whom it offends and puts a measureless gulf between him and 
the sinner. But, in the Christian conception, man inherited 
from Adam—whether through the Fall or by a primeval decree 
of which the Fall itself was but the first consequence—an original 
‘inherent sinfulness, whereby even those of the most spotless 
yirtue stood condemned in the sight of God. Nor could any 
merit of their own avail to wipe their guilt away, for, judged by 
the infinite excellence of the divine, no human virtue can be 
called positively good, and our best acts, far from yielding an 
-overplus of merit which could, as it were, be set against our 
natural faults, are themselves but poor attempts to carry out 
that rule of sublime perfection which alone could deserve the 
divine approval. 

In all this the religious consciousness is expressing in its own 
fashion an immeasurably heightened sense of the gulf between 
right and wrong. In so doing it sets for itself a problem which 
could not be solved altogether by ethical means. The Fathers 
of the Church, in fact, found the solution in the history of Christ, 
who, being at once God and perfect man, gives his own life for 
us. In its crudest forms this conception of Atonement implies 
the primitive doctrines of vicarious justice, and the transfer- 
ability of guilt, both of which belong to a relatively low stage of 
ethical development.1 But the conception was capable of a 
more refined expression, and in Anselm’s hands the death of 
Christ appears rather as a voluntary act redounding to the 
glory of God, and thereby meriting a recompense which Christ, 
not needing it for himself, transfers to men. He makes men 
the “heirs” of the “ superabundance of his plentitude . . . that 
what they owe for their sin may be remitted to them, and 
what, by reason of their sin, they lack, may be given to them.” ? 
In this treatment it is a question rather of the transfer of merit 
than of guilt, and this merit is not passed on mechanically (as 
in the semi-magical transfer of sins to the scapegoat), but only 
by spiritual means—to those who follow Christ according to the 


1 By the prevailing tradition down to Anselm’s time it would even 
appear that the Atonement was held necessary as a means of satisfying 
the otherwise imperative claim of the Devil. See Harnack, vol. vi. p. 70 
BEic its). 

* 7b., pp. 66, 67. 


= eZ 


508 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


rules which his Church has prescribed. This reconstruction, 
however, refines, but does not eliminate, the vicarious principle, 
and leaves us with the conception of a divine retribution, not 
as a consequence which attaches itself by a moral necessity to 
the state of the sinner’s soul, but as capable of being somewhat 
arbitrarily softened by a gracious consideration for the noble act 
of another. 

The death of Christ, however, does. not .win-salvatien—for-all 
men at a stroke. There are further conditions to-be-fulfiled. 
The first and greatest of these is faith in Christ himself. With- 
out faith no virtue can save, and, though they had no means of 
knowing the Gospel, the best of the heathen” are irrevocably 
lost. ‘This may be said to have been-common ground So the 
churches down to.the modern period. 2 But, further than this, 
faith not merely in Christ, but in the Church’s own scheme of of 


ante ater meena 


salvation is too often a necessity, and no virtue, no  sanctit ity, not. 
even the utmost plenitude of the true spirit. me religion, could, 
avail to make good this flaw. ‘‘ For any man who does not hold 
the unity of the Catholic Church, neither baptism, nor alms 
however profuse, nor death met for the name of Christ, can be 


1 Faith in God is similarly the first condition of salvation with Mohammed. 
So accursed are the infidels that they do not even deserve the prayers of 
the faithful. ‘‘ It is not for the prophet and those who believe to ask for- 
giveness for the idolaters, even though they be their kindred, after it has 
been made manifest to them that they are the fellows of hell”? (Koran, 1. 
chap. ix.; Palmer, p. 189). Sometimes the prophet casts his net wide. 
‘‘ There is no compulsion in religion; the right way has been distinguished 
from the wrong, and whoso disbelieves in Taghtt”’ (2. e. the idols and 
demons of the ancient Arabs) ‘‘ and believes in God, he has got hold of the 
firm handle in which is no breaking off; but God both hears and knows ” 
(Koran, i. chap. i1.; Palmer, p. 40). Elsewhere threats are uttered 
against the Christians. a | 

* Calvin even detracts from the merits of the heathen: The good 
works of the heathen are distinguished from bad and rewarded in this life, 
but Augustine is right in saying, ‘‘ That all who are strangers to the religion 
of the one true God, however they may be esteemed worthy of admiration 
for their reputed virtue, not only merit no reward, but are rather deserving 
of punishment because they contaminate the pure gifts of God with the 
pollution of their own hearts.’’ They are restrained from evil not by a 
sincere attachment to virtue, but by ambition, self-love, or some other 
irregular disposition. The end of what is right is always to serve God, and © 
as they regard not this end any externally good act performed by them 
becomes sin. 

Luther, though of more tolerant disposition, is equally clear that outside | 4 
Christendom there is no forgiveness and can be no holiness (Primary 
Works, ed. Wace and Buchheim, p. 104). The Anglican Article XIII. 
denies that “‘ works done before the grace of Christ’ are pleasant to God— 

‘ yea rather, for that they are not done as God hath willed and commanded - 
them to be done, we doubt not but they have the nature of sin.” This 


view is satisfactorily anathematized by the Council of Trent (Conn 
Juria, p. 14). 


MONOTHEISM 2 509 





_of benefit for his salvation.” 1 To die for Christ has become a 
‘small thing compared with acceptance of precisely the right 
‘formula to express his relations to the Deity. The ethical 
' consequences are double. Conduct, and not only conduct, but 
, the whole ethical attitude of a man, his character, his soul as 
_ expressing itself in his life and in his relations to other men, 
fall into the second place and are subordinated to the single 
' consideration of his attitude to the doctrines of the Church— 
_even when that attitude can only be expressed by saying that 
_he has never happened to hear of them. Secondly, the original 
universalism of the world religion disappears, and for the old 
circle of the fellow-citizens marked off rigidly from the rest of 
the world, is substituted the circle of the true believers marked 

off, too often, by a deeper, redder line from the rest of humanity. 


| 7. But faith 1 is not_necessarily the sole-condition necessary for 
salvation. Faith admitsto-the- Church; membership whereof is 
“signified by baptism. But what of the baptized Christian? Is 
he sanctified, “justified,” once for all, or may he yet sin and 
fall from grace? Should he fall, what means are open to him of 
regaining salvation? On these questions deep cleavage came 
into being. The dominant view in the early Church was that 
while baptism washed away all previous sins, after baptism 
grave sins could not, unless under some exceptional circum- 
stances, obtain forgiveness.” The Church itself was to be a com- 
“munity of saints, and down to the beginning of the third century 
expulsion was, in fact, the penalty for idolatry, adultery, forni- 
cation and murder? But during the latter half of the second 
century the practice of allowing a single penance for sin began 
to grow up as a “second plank ”’ of salvation for him who had 
made shipwreck, and from this beginning the great Catholic 
system of discipline was developed,* and the vast structure of 
the Canon Law. If the church was to “come down to earth ”’ 
and embrace not only the saints, but the whole mass of sinful, 

1 Quoted from Fulgentius in the Decr. Greg. Corpus Juris, p. 778, 
where, however, it is attributed to Augustine. Augustine suggests that good 
works may mitigate damnation when they cannot procure salvation, and 
the case of schismatics who endure martyrdom is instanced (De Patientia, 
c. 26, quoted with approval by Gratian, p. 1228). 

2 Harnack, vol. i. p. 172 (E. T.). 

3 Op. cit., vol. ii. pp. 108-109. The impenitent were threatened with the 
refusal of divine forgiveness. While exclusion was the logical consequence 
of the conception of a community of saints, it does not in fact seem to have 
been pressed home. Offenders were often dealt with in the light of a special 
revelation. 


4 The new system received a great impetus from the numerous lapses 
in the Decian persecution (2b., vol. ii. pp. 110-112). 


510 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


struggling humanity, it was clearly necessary to find some 
means of dealing with sins after baptism, and means more 
elastic than that of a single penance. It was essential to recog- 
nize true contrition as shown in the steadfast purpose to lead a 
new life. But the Church did more than recognize. It systema- 
tized it, enjoining confession as a proof of contrition, and 
penance not merely as an outpouring of the contrite heart, but 
as a means of satisfaction for the offence. The theory is 
somewhat crudely expressed at an early date by Cyprian, who 
held that no one could remain permanently without sin after 
baptism, that accordingly God’s wrath must be appeased by 
sacrifices, or that sins must be expunged by exceptional works 
of merit, among which almsgiving takes a conspicuous place.t 
Though it is insisted that such works can only be efficacious 
in so far as God is pleased to accept them, it is clear that the 
practical working out of such a principle will bring us peril- 
ously near to a systematic money composition for sins, quite 
comparable to the secular composition for wrongs in early laws. 
The theory itself, moreover, contains the suggestion that special 
merits may be weighed against sins; a consideration justly 
applicable by a divine judge summing up upon a man’s whole 
career, but deadly to the man himself.” 

The requisite, but perhaps not sufficient, correction to this 
mechanical doctrine of satisfaction was a strong insistence on 
the necessity of genuine contrition as evidenced by a change of 
heart. This is,in fact, put forcibly by the Fathers,? and a 
full contrition remains the main essential down to the thir- 
teenth century. Gratian is even uncertain whether confes- 
sion is strictly necessary for forgiveness,* and he has some 
difficulties as to repeated confession. For the “everyday lesser 
and lighter sins without which one’s life is not led”’ satisfac- 
tion is made sufficiently by the prayers of the faithful. As to 


1 Harnack, vol. ii. pp. 133, 134. 

2 Harnack’s comment is not too severe. ‘*‘ Kine Kirche, die sich bei 
diesen Sa&tzen auf die Dauer beruhigt hatte, hatte den letzten Rest ihrer 
Christlichkeit sehr bald eingebusst”’ (7b., p. 135). 

3’ Thus Ambrose, “‘ Penitentia est et mala preeterita plangere et plangenda, 
iterum non committere’’ (Gratian, p. 1211). Again, “‘ Satisfactio pzeni- 
tentiz est peccatorum causas excidere nec earum suggestionibus aditum 
indulgere ” (attributed to Augustine, De Dogm., p. 54, by Gratian, but 
wrongly so according to the editors). This is the change of heart, “* Ubi 
dolor finitur, deficit et pzenitentia ... Hine semper doleat et de dolore 
gaudeat’”’ (Augustine, De Penit., quoted 2b., p. 1212). This is the © 
doctrine of lasting remorse. 

4 See the long discussion in Gratian, Corpus Juris, pp. 1159-1190, and 
compare Harnack, vol. vi. pp. 245, 246. 

5 Gratian, p. 1214. 


MONOTHEISM 511 


| graver sins, Gratian is clear that they cannot be committed 
over and over again and still be redeemed by alms. Yet the 
Church allows that by penitence sins are remitted, not once, 


but sepissime, and though perfect penitence would be final, yet 
there are degrees in penitence as there are in charity, and he 
who has repented once is cleared of his sins until he falls again. 
In all this we see clearly enough the conflict of a stricter and a 
laxer view.2. With the growth of the opinion that penance does 
not pre-suppose full contrition, but only an attritio, which the 
sacrament of penance itself perfects, an impetus was given to 


_ the less spiritual conception,® and this attained its full develop- 
ment in the doctrine of indulgences whereby the treasures of 


merit stored up by the faithful for the Church, and at her dis- 
posal, could be held to remit the penalties of guilt here and in 
purgatory for her obedient children.4 We have not here to deal 
with the abuse of indulgences. It is sufficient for us to note 
how great is the departure from an ethical theory of penitence, 
when the Council of Trent pronounce an anathema, not merely 
on those who deny that the function of the priest in absolution 
is judicial, but on those who assert that true repentance is 
shown in a new life rather than in performance of penance.® 
The Indulgences led directly to the Reformation, and the abuse 
of “works ” went far to determine the attitude of the Reformers 


“to the whole question of Justification. The moralistic theory 


of nicely-graduated penalties for ’sin’and of the cancelling out of 
sin against merit had ended in ethical disorder and even scandal. 
Luther went back to the alternative principle of salvation, and 
justification by faith alone is announced in statements that 
sometimes seem to sweep the whole ethical order aside. 


“We see, then, howrich a Christian, or baptized man is, since, 
even if he would, he cannot lose his salvation by any sins, how- 


1 Corpus Juris, pp. 1213-1215. 

2 Or perhaps a formalistic as against an ethical view. The rules of 
confession became stricter—the decretals of Gregory IX. lay down de- 
finitely that every adult must confess at least once a year (Corpus Juris, 
p. 887)—while the spiritual meaning of penitence is watered down. 

3 See Harnack, vol. vi. pp. 248 ff. (E. T.). 

4 The doctrine of indulgence as laid down by Clement VI. is a very crude 
statement of the transfer of merit, and the consequent cancelling of sin. 

“ Quem quidem thesaurum non in sudario repositum, non in agro abscon- 
ditum, sed per beatum Petrum ...ejusque successores suis in terris 
Vicariis commisit (Dei filius) fidelibus salubriter dispensandum, et propriis 
et rationabilibus causis nunc pro totali, nune pro partiali remissione 
peene temporalis pro peccatis debits, tam generaliter quam specialiter.. . 
vere pcenitentibus et confessis misericorditer applicandum ” (quoted in 
Harnack, op. cit., p. 267). This is not much above the level of the sin-eater. 

®> Corpus Juris, Council of Trent, p. 39. 


ee 


512 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


ever great, unless he refuses to believe; for no sins whatever 
can condemn him but unbelief alone. All other sins, if faith 
in the divine promise made to the baptized man stands firm 
or is restored, are swallowed up in a moment through that same 
faith, yea, through the truth of God, because He cannot deny 
Himself, if thou confessest Him, and cleavest believingly to 
His promise; whereas contrition and confession of sins, and 
satisfaction for sins, and every effort that can be devised by man, 
will desert thee at thy need, and will make thee more miserable 
than ever, if thou forgettest ‘this divine truth, and puffest thyself 
up in such things as these. For whatever work is wrought 
apart from faith in the truth of God is vanity and vexation of 
spirit.” 1 


Fhis.might seem.to.open the door to Antinomianism. But 
Luther would maintain that instead of taking ‘morals out_of 
_religion; he had given them their true place within religion 
They are not. a-means.of grace, but_a consequence of. grace. 
“Good works do not make 4 good man, but a good man 1. does” 
good works.’ ? 'The servile theory of reward and punishment 
should be banished from ethics. The Christian virtues are a 
free service lovingly rendered to God. “Here is the truly 
Christian life, here is faith really working by love, when a man 
applies himself with joy and love to the works of that freest 
servitude in which he serves others voluntarily for nought, him- 
self abundantly satisfied in the fulness and richness of his own 
faith.” * Similarly in Calvin, he who knows God “ restrains 
himself from sin, not merely from a dread of vengeance, but 
because he loves and reveres God as his Father, honours and 
worships Him as his Lord, and, even though there were no hell, 
would shudder at the thought of offending Him.”’ 4 


1 Luther, Christian Liberty, p. 343. 2 4b.,'D. ie 

3 ib., p. 280 

4 Calvin, vol. i. p. 37; cf. vol. ii. p. 52, on Christian liberty. Calvin 
explicitly rejects the contention that the works excluded from the scheme 
of justification are merely the ceremonial works of the law. Moral works 
go with them (vol. i. p. 595). All our best actions judged by their in- 
trinsic merit are already defiled and polluted (p. 603), we have therefore 
merely to humble ourselves and submit to the divine mercy (p. 604), and 
our hope must be founded, not on our own regeneration, which is always 
imperfect, but on our being engrafted into the body of Christ and so 
gratuitously accounted righteous (pp. 610-611). Humility is here carried 
out consistently, but at the cost in the end of throwing an arbitrary choice 
on the Deity. 

It is important that, in Calvin, regeneration does not complete itself at a 
stroke. Its end is the restoration of the divine image within us, which is 
not accomplished in a day, but by continual and sometimes tardy advances. 
A fraction of evil still remains within us which produces irregular desires 
alluring us to sin (vol. i. p. 479). 


MONOTHEISM 513 


Here the ethical consciousness has regained its freedom from 
the-bondage of a system of rewards and punishments. Yet the 
union of the ethical and religious is even more completely un- 

“done. “It is one thing to point out that virtue ceases to be virtue — 
“when it asks for a reward. It is quite another to relegate the 
‘whole question of character and conduct to the second place. 
From this criticism the Counter-Reformation escaped by at- 
tempting an elaborate and extremely subtle reconciliation of 
faith and works, divine grace and the responsibility of the human 
will. Justification, the Council lays down, is by Christ alone, 
but only for those to whom the merit of his passion is communi- 
cated. The first step in this communication begins “‘ A Dei per 

.Christum Jesum preveniente gratia,’ by which people are called 
by no previously existing merits of their own to their own 
justification. But they must assent and freely co-operate with 
the grace of God, so that man is not inactive and yet could not 
move towards justification without God’s grace. Faith is the 
beginning of salvation, but faith without works is dead, and 
ueither faith nor works merit justification, nor could they confer 
it but for the grace of God. Grace is lost by any mortal sin, 
but those who fall away may be restored by aid of the sacrament 
of penance. 

The Council proceeds to pronounce thirty-three anathemas on 
any one who falls away from this narrow plank of truth whether 
to the right or to the left. It curses—to confine ourselves to 
the most important points—any one who shall maintain— 


» (Clauses 1, 2, 3) That man can be justified by works, or by 
any effort of his own will, without grace. (4) That human will 
cannot co-operate or decline co-operation with the Divine 
Spirit, ‘sed veluti inanime quoddam nihil agere.” (5 and 6) 
That there is no free will, but that God produces evil as well 
as good, “non permissive solum sed etiam proprie.” (7) That 
all works before justification are sins. (8) That the fear of hell 
which restrains from sins, is a sin. (9) That justification is by 
faith alone. (11) That it is by remission of sins without grace 
and charity. (12) That justifying faith is nothing but trust 
in the divine mercy. (13) That personal belief in our own 
salvation is necessary. (17) That grace is for those predestined 
to life only while others are called but do not receive grace “ut- 
ote divina potestate predestinatos ad malum.” (18) That 
God's commandments are impossible even for the justified. 
(19) That there is no gospel except faith. (20) That the justified 
is bound not to obedience to the commands of God and the 
Church but only to belief. (23) That man once justified cannot 
sin. (24) That works do not increase justification. (25 and 26) 
LL 


514 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


That the just earns no merit by good works. (27) That there 
is no mortal sin except unbelief. (28) That through sin faith 
is lost along with grace. (29) That the lapsed after baptism 
cannot recover grace without penance. (30) That the penitent 
sinner may escape temporal punishment. (81) That good works 
done in:contemplation of an eternal reward are sins. (32) That 
the good works of one who is justified are gifts of God in such a 
sense that they are not also merits of the man himself.t 


Here there is at least a stout attempt to reconcile divine 
grace and human responsibility, and to make morality along 
with belief essential to salvation. On the other hand, will is 
still second to grace—the prime mover—and conduct to belief— 
the preliminary condition, nor is the fundamental ethical point 
of the Reformers met, that moral service must be a service of 
perfect freedom. 


8. Christianity, like Buddhism, has an elaborate theory ofthe 
basis of morals, and has applied it to the moral-and-spiritual 
education of man. It can teach, encourage, admonish, punish, 
forgive, and raise again to repentance and_amendment-of-life.. 
But in applying its principles to life, it has.moved.between_two 
poles of difficulty, which are perhaps inherent in the-nature_of_ 
the subject. To elaborate a system of rewards and punishments 
is to run the risk of degrading morals into a form of spiritual 
calculation. The opposite alternative of declaring that conduct 
follows truly and naturally from the convinced faith of a Christian 
tends to degrade the ethical side of religion to a secondary 
place. On behalf of the Protestant theory it may be urged that 
rewards and punishments, except in so far as they are the 
inherent consequences of action, belong to the legal stage of 
ethical development. They are necessary for the maintenance 
of social order, but are out of place when brought into relation 
to moral obligation proper, and even tend to undermine the 
genuine ethical conception. Thus, it may be said, Protestantism, 
while seeming to give a less important place to ethics, was 
really restoring to the moral will the ‘‘freedom’’—from the 
bondage of external sanctions—which it had lost, and so has 
paved the way for a distinctly ethical view. But the truth is 
that neither Protestantism nor the Roman Church advanced to 
the ethical position that it is the good man through his goodness 
who is nearest to God. Too intent on the doctrine of exclusive 
salvation, with all that it meant for the dignity and importance 
of their respective churches, they readily agreed upon one point, 


1 Council of Trent, Corpus Juris, 13, 14, 15. 


MONOTHEISM 515 


that God was with them alone, and could see no good outside 
_their respective bodies. And they paid the penalty of spiritual 


pride by marring the conception of righteousness at its source, 
and breaking up that union of ethics and religion which it was 
the special function of Monotheism to achieve and maintain. 
In the theories underlying both the main forms of Western 
Christianity that union is impaired, if not destroyed, by concep- 
tions from which theologians have not been able to escape of 
the nature of God and his relation to the world and to man. 
Not being willing to surrender the conception of the Deity as 


-an omnipotent Creator standing outside his world, they have 


been compelled, under whatever disguises, to impute to him its 
evil along with its goodness. To explain the history of Christ 
they have maintained, with whatever refinements, the doctrine 
of transferable merit, and in magnifying faith they have made 
true lovableness and beauty of character secondary in God’s eyes. 
To this extent ethical monotheism has failed in its intention. 


9. With regard to the standard, as opposed to the basis of 
morals, all forms of monotheism have something in common. 


- God.is the Father of all. ‘Therefore, all men are brothers,.and 
should be members of oné Church. This potential universalism 


is common to Islam and Christianity, and the logic of it is so 


strong that it even half broke down the barriers of Jewish 
national éxclusiveness. “But in its fundamental teaching Chris- 


tianity has teally more affinity to Buddhism. In becoming 
Christian, as in becoming Buddhist, the whole moral nature of 
@ man undergoes a change. The point of view is, as.it.were, 
reversed. The “‘eye of the soul ” is turned in a new direction, 
The morals of the ‘‘natural”’ man, as we have seen them in 
development, concern the maintenance of his family, his clan, 
his community, his class. They are not selfish. They may 
impose upon him the extreme of self-denial. But they are in 
their most typical development the morals of the warrior— 
brave, loyal, proud, generous, upright, of the Greek or Roman 
patriot, of the modern man of honour. Sometimes they are 
called the morals of self-assertion. But the term is hardly 
just. Self-assertion was not the note of Regulus, or of the two 


‘Spartans who surrendered themselves to the Great King that 
they might wipe out the curse incurred by their country through 


its treatment of the Persian herald. It is truer to say that 


they are the morals of men who assert themselves, and with 


or through themselves their family, their caste, their country, 
whose very self-denial is founded on the pride of life, the 


—— 


516 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


honour of a name, the glory of a tradition. As against this, the 
Buddhist, and still more the Christian, teaching insists on a far 
more thoroughgoing self-surrender. Pride is now the dead-. 
liest of the deadly sins. Through pride the angels fell. Out 
of the mouths of babes and sucklings God has ordained praise. 
He has brought down the mighty from their seat and exalted 
the humble and meek. He has made the foolish things of 
this world to confound the wise. His own Son is despised 
and rejected of men, and his followers rejoice, and are ex- 
ceeding glad, when men persecute and revile them and say 
all manner of evil things against them for his sake. ‘They give 
up the world, they put away the joy and pride of living. They 
lose their own life, and in losing they find it. They must 
sacrifice, not merely, as the older ethics taught them, life and 
home and rank and fortune for their country’s good, but the 
very pride of race or family on which that sacrifice was based, 
the very idea of worldly greatness to achieve which for their 
city seemed the noblest duty of man. The soul must not 
merely sacrifice, it must surrender itself, abandon its pride, 
break down its barriers, and, in meekness, learn its duty. But, 
here the moral paradox begins, in this weakness lies its strength. 
Lao Tse had already taught that as water wears away the 
rock, so the weakest things of this world overcome the strong. 
This total self-surrender to the eternal truth meant a complete 
spiritual victory over the lords of time. The meek shall inherit 
the earth, not merely the heavens. Because they have humbled 
themselves beyond all others they are set above all others. 
They overcome hatred with love. They conquer by refusing 
to resist, and meet assault by turning the other cheek to the 
smiter. And beneath this yielding softness of exterior they 
reveal, when the right season comes, a firmness which is harder 
than adamant. 

In the old moral order men could, with a clear conscience, be 
equally good haters and good lovers. It was said to them of 
old time; ~““Thou shalt love. thyneighbour-and_—hate thine. 
enemy.” But the code of self-surrender has no room for hate. 
Hatred is assertion, and its exercise manifests the fallacy of 
assertion, for its open expression is the blood feud which never 
ends, but remains an open wound in the vitals of society. 
Morally regarded, revenge is a matter of physical strength and 
a poor satisfaction at best. There is a nobler way of dealing 
with an enemy which conquers him far more effectually. 
‘“ Hatred,’”? Buddha taught, ‘‘does not cease by hatred but by 
love.” If you are in the wrong, it is for you to make amends. 


MONOTHEISM 517 


If it were he, then pity him for that he is wandering in error 
and blind to the truth. No doubt wrong-doing must carry its 
punishment. But it is not for finite intelligence to measure the 
guilt and assign the due penalty upon another man. ‘“ Venge- 
ance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord.” As for us, the best 
of us are sinners infinitely far from the divine perfection and 
needing infinite mercy for ourselves. If we judge others, shall 
not we ourselves be judged? And if neither personal antagon- 
isms nor moral differences are to interfere with love, still less 
ean the barriers of class, and race, and sex be allowed to stand. 
We are all alike members one of another, sons of God, brothers 
and sisters upon earth and co-heirs of the kingdom of heaven. 
Among us there can be no difference of Jew or Gentile, bond or 
free, noble or lowly. He is most noble who the lowliest duties 
on himself doth lay. The fallen woman becomes a saint and 
the crucified thief is the first to sup with the Saviour in Para- 
dise. The kingdom of God is not peopled by those who have 
proved themselves the strongest on this earth. To their Father 
the fate of the weakest and most despised is of no less moment 
than that of those who have many talents entrusted to 
them. The principle of Comprehensiveness—against the more 
exclusive view of earlier morals—is here pushed to its furthest 
point. Here, at least, Christian ethics at their best have been 
determined and consistent, and here in this resolute recognition 
of weakness has been their strength.1 Nor is salvation merely a 
personal end which each must win for himself. Itis also the duty 
of every good Christian to win it for his brothers. He must go 
out into the highways and hedges and compel them to come in. 
The universalism of religion, then, is not the somewhat pale and 
negative doctrine of equal rights on which moral philosophy 
insists. It imposes a no less universal standard of duty, and 


1 Any one who will compare St. Paul’s description of Charity, in which 
term the whole of the distinctively Christian ethics is summed up, with 
the Buddhist description of the true Brahmana, with the description of the 
Highminded or Great Souled man in the Ethics (book iv.), and of the 
Superior man in scattered passages of the Confucian Analects (see below, 
chap. v.), will form an idea of the relation of Christianity to other ethical 
systems. I take the description of the Great Souled man as typical of 
ordinary Greek thought, of the pagan “pride of life.”” The Great Souled 
man ‘‘deems himself worthy of great things, being in reality worthy 
of them.” There is an honesty in his attitude to himself which is by no 
means to be confused with arrogance—a ‘“‘ proper pride ’”’ which is the 
alternative to the Christian humility. But for passages typical of Greek 
philosophy as opposed to pre-philosophie thought we must look elsewhere, 
e.g. in Aristotle himself to the description of the philosophic life (book 
x.), to Plato’s description of the just man, and to that of the wise man in 
Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius. 


518 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


demands a missionary spirit on the part of its true professors. 
Ultimately this carries with it a demand upon society, which 
owes to its members, and to the outer heathen, the means of | 
grace. Whether as expressing the claims or the duties of the 
individual, the doctrine of salvation may be taken as the keystone 
of the Christian ethics, the basis of its aggressive conquering 
activity, the inspiration of that wide humanity which, under the 
most distorted forms of human personality, recognizes the same 
essential soul to be saved. It enshrines a truth which modern 
rationalism has sometimes ignored, and it lays the foundation 
of an ethics which is not content with the mere regulation of 
relations, but sets out to conquer the world for the Spirit. 


10. Love, universal benevolence, forgiveness, humility, meek- 
ness, combined with the extreme of.resolute endurance | for ¢ con-— 


— eT ann 


“In this detachment, however, were seeds of trouble. We have” 

“already seen that the Buddhist life could hardly be lived in its _ 
perfection by the ordinary householder. The spiritual and ‘the _ 
“human had already fallen apart. In Christianity. the fissure is _ 
in some respects deeper. It is in monotheism that there first 
arises a Clear distinction between the natural and the super- 
natural. In the earlier phases of religion the intervention of 
gods and spirits was a matter of course, a thing of everyday 
life. But in proportion as the one God absorbs all power into 
himself, the course of the world comes to be thought of as 
running smoothly and continuously in the line which he has 
laid down for it, and his direct interference with its orderly 
movements becomes something marked and exceptional, re- 
served for great occasions or for the special prayers of the 
faithful. Thus a well-marked antithesis arises between “na- 
ture ’’? conceived as the ordinary course of events, and the 
“supernatural ”’ conceived as that which belongs directly to the 
sphere of God. This antithesis dominates Christian teaching 
from first to last, and has a profound influence upon ethics. For 
in proportion as nature is separated from God, that which per- 
tains to nature is set in antithesis to that which belongs to 
God, and is apt accordingly to partake of the character of sin. 
The great institutions of humanity, marriage, fatherhood, citizen- 
ship, are things of this world. The Christian must make his 
account with them, but they are not of Christian origin. He 
is to honour the king, because he is not to concern himself with 


MONOTHEISM 519 


| worldly revolutions. The powers that be are ordained of God, 


but merely to regulate the secondary and profane affairs of this 


life. Christ’s true kingdom is not of this world. It may be 


necessary for the Church in the end to come out into the world 
and regulate the affairs of men, for the universal benevolence 
taught us by Christ forbids us to be indifferent to the happiness 
or misery of our brother-men, and, above all, we can in no way 
afford to neglect their spiritual interests, to which state laws 
ought in future to accommodate themselves. But the emergence 
of the Church into affairs of this world is like the descent of 
Plato’s philosopher into the cave. The true saint finds no joy 
init. His life is not there, but hid with Christ in God. And if 
in the end the Church became too much a thing of this world 
and allowed itself to be by the world corrupted, that is but the 
other side of the same shield. The detachment of what was 
best in Christianity from the world’s affairs made a Christian 
body unfit to rule the world’s affairs. Christianity has, in 
fact, no theory of society by which to guide itself. Its doc- 
trine is personal. The common life that it contemplates is 
a life of brotherly love, a community of saints, where all things 
are in common and lawsuits are not, nor any other mode of 
maintaining order by the strong arm. Hence, amid all the 
wonderful descriptions of charity, of love, of self-surrender, we 
hear very little of justice. Indeed, how could it be otherwise ? 
What need of justice when love readily yields up all? Why 
talk of a fair division to one who, if his cloak be taken, will make 
that a ground for giving up his garment? What need for equal 
rights among men who claim nothing for themselves and yield 
all they have to all who want ? 


11. The code of the Sermon on the Mount appears to con- 
template what in modern phrase we should call a voluntaryist 
or Anarchist community. Non-resistance is its central feature. 
There is to be no fighting, no revenge, no lawsuits, no oaths, 


no self-defence, no insistence on private property, no excessive 


provision for the future. If there is to be any marrying or 
giving in marriage at all, there is to be no divorcing of wives 
“save for the cause of fornication.”’ There is to be unbounded 
charity without display. Altogether a life that might be lived 
for a while by a picked brotherhood of perfect men and women." 
How were these rules to be made applicable to a world in which 
men and women are so far from perfect? In regard to the 

1 In fact, the Christian life, far from being a scheme of permanent social 
regeneration, was originally conceived as preparatory to an imminent 


millennium. There is here an important point of difference between the 
primitive Christian commonwealth and the Buddhist order. 


520 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


general principle that law and government are necessities of 
human existence, the Church was helped by those passages of 
the Scriptures prescribing obedience to constituted authority. 


These sufficed as long as Christianity was the religion of a- 


persecuted sect, but when it became the official creed of the 
empire a further step was necessary, and means had to be 
found of justifying believers in acting as judges and in executing 
the law upon criminals. ‘This was done by drawing a distinction 


between the man and his office. Even the judicial act of © 


torture was but faintly reprobated or even justified by the 
Fathers.2, The only serious doubt was as to capital punishment. 
This was so genuine that Augustine begs Count Marcellinus, 
in punishing certain Donatists who had murdered a Catholic 
priest, to avoid either inflicting death or mutilation.? For a 
long period Christian clerks refused to enter death sentences in 
so many words, and at certain periods, e.g. in England under 
the Conqueror, death sentences were wholly suspended for a 
time under the influence of the Church. In general, punish- 
ment was to be limited by charity, and not to be embittered 
by the spirit of vengeance. The reproof administered to the 
apostles for wishing to call fire down upon the Samaritans was 
a warning against vindictiveness. Injuries to self should not 
be punished, but only those against God or our neighbour. 


Punishment is like a medicine, and the precept that we should — 


love our enemies does not mean that we should relax censure, 
or, if in the end it is required, punishment, but that we should so 
carry out punishments as to reform the criminal and console 
the penitent. These were excellent precepts, though they bore 


1 Augustine, Epis. 154, adopted by Gratian, Corpus Juris, p. 932; cf. 924, 
‘* Non imputatur fidelibus qui ex officio aut tormenta exercent aut capitalem 
sententiam ferunt’’; and see letter of Pope Innocent there quoted. Cf. 
Jerome, super Hierem., vol. iv. p. 22 (Gratian, p. 939). ‘* Homicidas et 
sacrilegos et venenarios punire non est effusio sanguinis sed legum minis- 
terium.”’ Cf. Gratian, 896, quoting or paraphrasing (see note 7b.) Au- 
gustine on Psalm cviil., to the effect that retaliation, though it is hardly 
the part of a good man to demand it, may rightly be inflicted by the judge. 
‘¢ Hic enim malum pro malo redderet, judex vero non, sed delectatione 
justitie justum injusto quod est bonum pro malo,” an ingenious turning of 
the phrase, but surely a perversion of its original meaning. 

2 See preceding note, and Corpus Juris, p. 936. In Ep. 159, Augustine 
congratulates Marcellinus on getting at the truth without the use of any 


torture worse than flogging, “‘ qui modus coercionis . . . abipsis parentibus 
adhibetur, ut seepe etiam in judiciis ab episcopis solet haberi”’ (Gratian, 
p. 929). 


3 Ep. 159. Gratian, p. 928. 
4 See Pollock and Maitland, i. 88; ii. 452. 
5 Gratian, Corpus Juris, pp. 909-914. Cf. also Ambrose, Sermon viii., 


quoted p. 915. Mercy may be unjust. We should not give unrepentant — 


robbers the’opportunity of returning to their wickedness. 


MONOTHEISM §21 


singularly little fruit, and for fifteen centuries the criminal 
codes of most Christian nations remained a standing reproach 
to civilization. 

Recognizing the authority of the law and the courts, the. 
Church was also compelled to admit. the oath. It should be 
taken not lightly, but when civil necessities so required.) It 
“has been left to isolated sects, like the Society of Friends, to. 
maintain the literal teaching of the Sermon _on_the Mount. 
“on this point.. There remained the further question whether 
“the law should be obeyed when in conflict with conscience or 
the dictates of religion. The powers that be are ordained of 
God, and that has led many devout Christians to a doctrine 
of passive obedience. The Canon Law, however, recognized 
that disobedience to secular authorities is often necessary, 
and if, possibly, it may be right “‘ per obedientiam bonum 
deserere,” yet it can never be lawful positively to do wrong.? 
The doctrine of non-resistance was destined to play its part 
as a moral support of absolutism, and it was even accepted 
by Calvin, though rejected with much practical effect by so 
many Calvinists.2 It is manifestly appropriate only to a 
small community which desires to lead its own life in the midst 
of a great world that it can never hope to control. Hence 
its most practical exponent in the modern world has been the 
great writer who, living under the shadow of a tyranny of 
overwhelming power, could defy all efforts to silence him, 
primarily because he deprecated violence and confined the efforts 
of himself and his school to moral protests.. Yet this same teach- 
ing, effective while the tyranny was supreme, is out of date and 
mischievous from the first moment at which it is shaken. 

The principle of resistance admitted in the case of resort to 
the machinery of law, is extended to the more doubtful case 
of warfare. We have already traced the outline of Christian 
teaching on this point, and the somewhat dismal tale need not 
here be told again. On this side also the maintenance of the pure 
teaching of the Gospel has been left to small and isolated sects. 

While the doctrine of non-resistance was frankly abandoned 
by the majority of the churches, the doctrine of communism 
had a somewhat different history. It is accepted in the Canons 


1 Corpus Juris, pp. 861-862. 

* Gratian, p. 671, chap. 99. Chap. ci. is more stringent, and see chap. xci. 
and exii. Even a bishop should not be obeyed if he should enjoin the 
singing of a mass for heretics (p. 669). 

3 Institutes, ii. 62, 63. However, Calvin admits that God sometimes 
raises up a servant as an avenger. He is also, of course, quite clear that 
no behest of a magistrate that is contrary to divine law must be obeyed 
ef. iv. chap. xx). 


522 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


as a part of the divine law, but as abrogated by the positive 
law of the empire.t Instead of communism the Church preached 
abundance in charity, and on this was founded the great system 
of poor relief which has played so large a part in the medieval 
and modern world. On this side the Christian teaching, though 
in a modified form, was incorporated in established institutions. 
But still the pure teaching of the Gospel was left to a few con- 
demned sectaries to preserve, and was put aside by respect- 
ability as being merely that which “certain Anabaptists do 
falsely boast.’’ Yet the ideal has never wholly died out, and we 
owe to it in our own times all the zeal and energy which Christian 
Socialists have thrown into the movement for reforming the 
conditions of industrial life. Here as elsewhere it is the few who 
take the Gospel literally that leave their mark upon the world. 


12. To attempt to trace the full influence of Christian ethics 
on social morality is far beyond the scope of this work. It is 

a question of countless actions and interactions, nor are there 
many questions of history in which a just verdict would be so” 
““@ifficult to come at. Christianity, like other movements, in — 
~ descending from the mount to the plain loses much of its purity, 
while in turn gaining something from the impulse of other 
movements and contact with a wider life. These actions and _ 
reactions make up a great part of the history of nineteen.cen-.. 
turies, and to deal with them fairly would be.a..work for. many. 
volumes. We have, however, in the first part of this work, 
seen something of the workings of Christian teaching in various 
departments of law and morals, of its influence on marriage 
and the position of women, on criminal justice, on war, on 
slavery and class distinctions, on the practice of benevolence, 
on the idea of the state and its functions in social life. This 
influence is not one that can be summed up in a single word as 
good or bad, nor isit even always harmonious in itself. Naturally 
the different sects into which Christendom has been divided 
have at times worked in contrary directions in the ethical as 
in the theological sphere. If, for instance, we take the ques- 
tion of slavery, we should have to weigh the recognition of the 
institution by the early Church against the prohibition of the 


1 “ Jure divino omnia sunt communia omnibus, jure vero constitutionis 
hoc meum illud alterius est,’’ Gratian, p. 12). Cf. p. 2, where the principle 
is referred distinctly to “natural” law. Augustine ingeniously applies it 
to justify the confiscations of the property of the Donatists (p. 12, note) in 
favour of the Catholics. No one holds any property except by human law 
as interpreted by the emperor. The emperor gives and the emperor may 
take away. There is no trace here of that divine right of property of whieh 
modern orthodoxy sometimes speaks. 


MONOTHEISM 523 


enslavement of Christian prisoners and the encouragement. of 


manumission: we should have to put the sanction of negro 


slavery in the sixteenth century in the one scale, and all the 


work of the Quakers and the Evangelical churches for its aboli- 
tion in the other. If we take criminal justice, we should have 
to allow for the spirit of clemency which arose from the sanctity 
attached by the early Church to human life, and equally to 
admit that the religious persecutions stand as instances of what 
human savagery, pushed to its extreme limit, can achieve. If 


our example were the position of women, we should have to 
weigh the loss of the independence and dignity enjoyed by 


the Roman matron and the degradation for a long period of 
the ideal of marriage, against a conception of the moral and 
religious capabilities of womanhood which paved the way, 
first for charity, and ultimately for justice. In these and so 
many other cases “ Christianity ’’ is hardly to be distinguished 
from the civilization of Christendom. What is done officially, 
whether for good or for evil, is generally done in its name, and 
that cause must, indeed, be desperate, which cannot find some 
Biblical text or patristic saying to twist to its support. It would 
manifestly be unscientific to attribute corruptions of this sort to 
Christianity as such. On the other hand, if what is bad finds 
support in some distortion of religious teaching, it is equally 
true that the churches claim credit for much that is good with 
which Christianity has no special connection, and the epithet 
Christian is freely applied to virtues and moral principles that 
are far older and more universal than Christianity. Lastly, 
when we are taking the work of special sects into account, we 
must remember that their ideas, though they themselves might 
claim them as exclusively Christian, may be in greater or less 
degree inspired by the general culture of their age to which 
elements not distinctly Christian would contribute. 

_Probably we shall be safe in following the historian of the 
period during which Christianity superseded Paganism in attri- 
buting to Christian influence in the first.place a heightened sense 


of the sanctity of human life. We have seen this at work in 
the teaching of the Church as to penal law. Mr. Lecky? calls 


attention also to the prohibition of abortion and infanticide, 
along with the growth of public provision for exposed children 
and for children of destitute parents.2 In this relation the 
action of the Church was determined rather by the belief in the 


1 EHuropean Morals, vol. ii. p. 20. 
2 «b., p. 30. Constantine’s law, however, provided for the enslavement 
of the exposed child to its protector. That was repealed for the Eastern 
empire by Justinian. 


524 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


terrible fate awaiting unbaptized children than by humanitarian 
feeling in our sense of the term.1 The suppression of gladia- 
torial shows is a more decisive instance of the triumph of 
humanity, and with this we may associate the efforts, perhaps 
not very strenuous efforts, of the Church to suppress private 
fighting. For the rest, the historian lays stress on those efforts 
to mitigate slavery and warfare, and to extend and systematize 
works of charity, to which reference has been already made. 
Apart from these contributions to humanitarian progress the 
ideals of asceticism and celibacy and the establishment of indis- 
soluble monogamous marriage (resting, however, on the free con- 
sent of both parties) were the most noteworthy contributions of 
organized Christianity to the ethics of the medizval world. 

If, however, we take the Christian teaching, apart from all in- 
adequacies of historical application, as a statement of an ethical 
ideal, and seek to measure its value as an ideal, a more decisive 
judgment is possible. It carries one side of ethics to the highest_ 
- possible pitch of perfection, but it leaves another side _compara-_ 
_tively neglected. The conception of a brotherhood of love based 
on the negation of self is demonstrably inadequate to the pro- 
blem of reorganizing society and intelligently directing human 
efforts. Even on the personal side it is deficient, for human 
progress depends on the growth and perfecting of faculty, and 
therefore requires that provision be made for a Self- develop- 
ment which is not selfishness but builds up a better personality 
on a basis of self-repression. Equally on the social side the 
ideal of loving self-surrender is beautiful, but not always right. 
Utter self-sacrifice is magnificent, but it is not justice, and 
justice and reciprocity are even more essential elements in 
any commonwealth that can survive and include average 
humanity within it than the readiness to resign all for the sake 
of others—a willingness which can hardly be made a uni- 
versal rule without bringing action to a standstill. Nor does 
true love mean brotherly kindness and a diffused benevolence 
alone, but legitimately includes the whole gamut of human 
passions—if the lust of the eye be excepted—and a working 
ethical system must not suppress but provide a place for these. 
Applying these considerations, we can see that spiritual religion, 
though it recognizes personality, fails to give it full scope in all 
its legitimate developments. It exalts the common life, but pays 
little attention to the actual conditions of any social structure. 
It inculcates duties, but overlooks rights—a factor scarcely less 
essential to social progress. Finally, having found its ideal in 

1 Hence in particular the condemnation of abortion (Lecky, vol. ii. p. 23). 


MONOTHEISM 525 


the heavens, and invested it with supernatural authority, it leaves 
it to the priesthood to bring down to earth, by that method of 
exegesis which tends too often to practise men in the art of 
asserting principles without meaning them, and accepting ideals 
with readiness because they know how to escape the practical 
difficulties of their application. Self-suppression, universal 
brotherhood, the conquest of strength by silent endurance, these 
remain ideals of conduct for which every rational system of 
ethics must find a place, but they are not the whole of social 
morality, and some of them are even capable of being pressed to 
the point of danger. It is not merely that, humanity being 
what it is, the life of the Gospel could only be lived by a select 
community of saints. There is another side to the question. 
The opposition of the natural to the supernatural degrades the 
ordinary life of men. What is of this world belongs to the 
flesh, and what belongs to the flesh is of the nature of sin. In 
the pursuit of an ideal which few or none can realize, the ele- 
ment of the divine which lies in our ordinary human nature 
is overlooked, or rather it is denied. That the love of man and 
woman, of parent and child, may be a passion which can on 
occasion raise the most ordinary and least saint-ike among 
us to heights of self-negation which no ascetic can surpass, 
is a truth to which common experience testifies. Yet super- 
naturalism which could paint the mystic love of the cloistered 
enthusiast could only conceive of sexual love as a bondage of 
the flesh! This utter misconception of one side of human 
nature is only an extreme case of a general tendency. Super- 
natural ethics fail in that they do not recognize the ideal 
element in the performance of natural duty. Love of country, 
loyalty to comrades, devotion to truth and justice, all serve 
earthly and temporal ends, but are in themselves to be reckoned 
among the spiritual forces that guide and inspire mankind. 
With this interpretation of the spiritual, supernaturalism is not 
contented. Its service must be consciously dedicated to the 
glory of God. It must eliminate the passions which retain in 
them anything of an earthly element. It must cut the ties that 
bind us to this world and extirpate at the root the deadly 
passions that drag us into mortal sin. Hence it demands a life 
separated from the world, which mixes with the world from 
benevolence alone, but for its own part is dead to this natural 
existence and lives only for Christ. 

Fortunately for the Western..world-supernaturalism, was..but~ 


1 For the revolting conception of womanhood held by many of the 
saints, see Lecky, History of European Morals, vol. ii. pp. 116 seq. 


526 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


one side of.Christianity. Christ himself was no anchorite,and... 
“his“teaching, if exacting, was also tender. There. have never 
been wanting individuals to show the world that it was possible _ 
to follow in his steps, and live externally the ordinary life of a~ 
conimonplace citizen while their souls within. them are filled with u] 
their Master’s teaching and overflowed in charity to all mankind, 

It is here, in the simple personal following of Christ, that the 
strength of Christianity will always lie—not in the mazes of 
dogmatic theology, not in the spiritual machinery for drawin 
souls to God, not in the teaching of the churches, not in the pomp _ 
of ceremonial, not in the fervour of the preacher, not even in the — 
enthusiasm of the mystic who dreams of his oneness with God—~ 
not in these does Christ live, but first in the few who live as he __ 
did, shedding the light of peace around them, and next in the 
wider circle of those who, dwelling on the borderland dim. betwixt... 
vice and virtue, or in the twilight of conventional ideas, are 
irradiated now and then by a gleam from the true meaning. of 
words with which they have been all their lives familiar, and for 

a while see themselves as they are and respond with some effort, 
however faint and short, towards the truth of things. 


CHAPTER V 
ETHICAL IDEALISM 


1. THE preceding chapters have illustrated the close connection 
_ between ethical and. religious ideas. We have, in fact, seen 
ethics, upon the whole, in a position of dependence and subor- 
dination. But we have now to deal with more independent 
forms of ethical thinking. In barbaric society, indeed, reflection 
of this kind occupies no very important place; it hardly goes 
beyond some of those proverbial maxims of conduct which form 
the simple worldly wisdom of uncultivated peoples all the 
world over. In the early civilizations we find this proverbial 
philosophy acquiring a somewhat fuller development as exem- 
plified in the seven sages of ancient Greece and the gnomic 
_ poetry which belongs to the same period. We have already 
mentioned certain regular treatises on practical morals which 
are a feature of ancient Egyptian literature. Writings of this 
kind are not without their value for the historical student, pre- 
cisely because they do little more than formulate the current 
ideas of the age to which they belong. Indeed, the whole race 
of proverbial moralists through the four thousand years that 
separate Ptah-Hotep and Martin Tupper are apt to degenerate 
into platitudinists. They utter irreproachable sentiments—senti- 
ments, at least, irreproachable according to the standard of 
their own times—but we can hardly think that even in their 
own day men rose from the perusal of them with any deep feel- 
ing of gratitude for heightened insight into the laws of conduct 
or the relations of man to man. In them the ethical ideal is 
not yet born; they take the traditional morality and formulate 
it into neat and general statements. 

It is far otherwise with the class of thinkers with whom we 
have now to deal. We have seen in the history of religion a 
stage at which the divine (which at first is lower, and for long 
ages is at least no higher, than the human) becomes idealized, 
and there arises_a conception of a spiritual being which is an 
embodiment of all that man can dream of perfection. This is 
one way in which an ideal dawns upon humanity. The other 
way is through reflection upon life and man’s place in it, upon 

527 


528 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


human nature and its potentialities, upon human action and its 
ends. Following this road, thought proceeds by the deliberate 
examination of human experience, and seeks thereby to deter- 
mine where man’s true purpose lies. By this method, with - 
little or no reference to supernatural sanctions or even to divine 
commands, it may make for itself an ideal of conduct, to which 
it calls man to conform simply because such conduct is best for 
himself and for humanity. In such a method we have the 
beginning of an ethical system conceived as the basis of a con- 
scious ordering of human life by the deliberate efforts of the 
best and wisest members of the human race; and we have now 
to trace briefly the development of this ideal, and to indicate 
the phases which it has assumed and the function which it has 
performed in different civilizations, 


2. Between the sixth and the fourth centuries before Christ 
schools of thought following this method arose in two distant 
parts of the world—in China and in Greece. The Chinese 
thinkers founded a great system which from that day to this, in 
spite of the efforts of the reactionary dynasty which destroyed 
the classical books and prohibited their teaching, has guided 
the destiny of what was, down almost to our own times, by far 
the greatest empire of the world in point of population. It has 
supplied the rule of life for the governing classes and maintained 
the essence of Chinese culture intact through, and in spite of, 
successive irruptions of semi-barbarous conquerors; and may 
thus, so far as its practical influence is concerned, fairly claim 
respect as one of the greatest and most influential doctrines of 
ethical conduct which the world has known. What, then, were 
the leading doctrines of the founder of this influential school ? 

The first principle of an ethical idealism, which is to rise 
above the common morality of custom and to depend on its own 
excellence rather than upon any religious sanction to recom- 
mend it to mankind, must from the nature of the case lay down 
that, for the individual, virtue is its own reward. It is this 
which distinguishes the ethical from the supernatural view of 
morals on the one hand and the materialistic or prudential on 
the other. This principle is constantly insisted upon by Con- 
fucius: “‘I have not seen a person who loved virtue or one 
who hated what is not virtuous. He who loved virtue would 
esteem nothing above it; he who hated what is not virtuous 
would practise virtue in such a way that he would not allow 
anything that was not virtuous to approach his person.” ? The 

1 Legge, Oonfucian Analects, Book IV. chap. vi. sec. 1. 


ETHICAL IDEALISM 529 


sage whose conscience is clear and who knows that his dealings 
are upright can fear no punishment from the powers of this 
world. “Heaven has produced the virtue that is in me. 


* Hwan-T’uy—what can he do to me?”! And again: “‘ The 


determined scholar and the master of virtue will not seek to 


live at the expense of injuring their virtue. They will even 


sacrifice their lives to preserve their virtue complete.”’2 Every 
man is master of himself, and thus, as the Western Stoic taught, 
has a sovereignty which no one but himself can take from him. 
“The commander of the forces of a large state may be carried 
off, but the will of even a common man cannot be taken from 
him.” The sage is not made of adamant nor is he wholly 
unaffected by fortune and misfortune, but he shows his strength 
by rising superior to calamity. ‘‘ With coarse rice to eat, with 
water to drink, and my bended arm for a pillow, I still have 
joy in the midst of these things.” Even the desire of post- 
humous fame must be banished from the mind. It is true 
that by a very human weakness the superior man dislikes the 
thought of his name not being mentioned after his death,> but 
this motive is rejected as unworthy. “To live in obscurity and 
yet practise wonders in order to be mentioned with honour in 
future ages, this is what I do not do.’ ® Nor is there any hint 
of a divine reward. ‘The current doctrine of universal animism 
is not indeed explicitly rejected by Confucius, but he nowhere 
appeals to the benefits to be gained from the cult of spiritual 
beings, but, on the contrary, warns his followers to have as little 
to do with them as possible, and devote themselves instead to 
their duty towards their neighbours. ‘“‘'To give oneself earnestly 
to the duties due to men and, while respecting spiritual beings, 
to keep aloof from them, may be called wisdom.” ’ Nor does 
Confucius encourage thinking about the future life. Ke Loo 
asked about serving the spirits of the dead. The Master said, 
* While you are not able to serve men, how can you serve their 
spirits?’ Ke Loo added, “‘I venture to ask about death.’ He 
was answered, “ While you do not’ know life, how can you know 
about death?’ ® Only the consciousness that the Supreme 
spiritual being who inhabits heaven knows him through and 
through remains a consolation. “‘ Alas! there is no one that 
knows me. . . . But there is heaven ;—that knows me.’’® And 


1 Legge, Confucian Analecis, Book IV. chap. vii. sec. 22. 


2 4b., Book XV. chap. viii. 3 ib., Book IX. chap. xxv. 

4 74b., Book VII. chap. xv. ® 76., Book XV. chap. xix. 

6 The Doctrine of the Mean, chap. xi. ? Analects, Book VI. chap. xx. 

8 ib., Book XI. chap. xi. ® 1b., Book XIV. chap. xxxvii. 
MM 


530 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


the appointment of heaven is frequently recognized and used 
as a ground for ignoring the littleness of men and the obstinacy 
of rulers. ‘‘If my principles are to advance, it is so ordered. 
If they are to fall to the ground, it is so ordered. What can 
the Kung-pih-Leaou do, where such ordering is concerned ?”’ ? 
Fortified by the favour of heaven, the superior man rises above 
all ordinary human weaknesses and is completely master of him- 
self. ‘‘ The way of the superior man is threefold. . . . Virtuous, 
he is free from anxieties; wise, he is free from perplexities ; 
bold, he is free from fear.’”’2 Upon the whole, Stoicism itself 
has hardly drawn a bolder picture of the self-poised, self-master- 
ing personality, lord of his own bosom and therefore of all things 
that affect him. But as with Stoicism, so with Confucius, this 
self-mastery is founded upon nature, and manifests itself in con- 
formity to the rules of social life, in the execution of justice and 
the practice of benevolence. ‘‘The doctrine of our master,” 
said Tsang, ‘“‘is to be true to the principles of our nature and 
the benevolent exercise of them to others—this, and nothing 
more.’ ? Similarly, the Master said, ‘‘ Man is born to upright- 
ness. If a man lose his uprightness and yet live, his escape 
from death is the effect of mere good fortune.”’* This nature is 
conceived as common to all men, the differences that arise being 
due to their own conduct. “‘ By nature, men are nearly alike ; 


by practice, they get to be wide apart.” ® Nor is virtue to be 


found in deserting the common life and going out into the 
wilderness to seek for occasions on which to manifest one’s 
superiority. ‘‘ The path is not far from man. When men try 
to pursue a course which is not far from the common indications 
of conscience, this course cannot be considered The Path.” ® 
But instruction is often essential. Knowledge of duties may be 
inborn, acquired by study, or after a painful feeling of ignorance. 
They may come with natural ease, from a desire for their advan- 
tages, or by strenuous effort.? The only distinctions which the 
teacher claims for himself are, first, that his efforts towards per- 


fect virtue, though never successful, are constant and unceasing— 


the Master does not rank himself with the sage and the man of 


perfect virtue, but strives without satiety to become such *— 
secondly, that he passes his life in learning. ‘In a hamlet of 


ten families there may be found one honourable and sincere _ 


1 Analects, Book XIV. chap. xxxviii. 2 ib., Book XIV. chap. xxx. 
3 74b., Book IV. chap. xv. 4 1b., Book VI. chap. xvii. 
5 4b., Book XVIL. chap. ii. 

6 Doctrine of the Mean,-chap. xiii. sec. 1. 

? 4b., chap. xx. sec. 9. 

8 Analects, Book VII. chap. xxxii. and xxxiil. 


ETHICAL IDEALISM 531 


as I am, but not so fond of learning.” 1 That is to say, the 
fundamental moral qualities are widely diffused, but not the 
intellectual attainments which direct them. On the other hand, 
mere customary morality is sweepingly condemned, and here 
breathes the true spirit of ethical idealism. ‘‘ Your good, careful 
people of the villages are the thieves of virtue ’’ ?—a text which 
is ably commented upon by the greatest of Confucians— 


“Wan Chang said, ‘Their whole village styles those men 
good and careful. In all their conduct they are so. How was 
it that Confucius considered them the thieves of virtue ? ’ 

“ Mencius replied, * If you would blame them, you find nothing 
to allege. If you would criticize them, you have nothing to 
criticize. They agree with the current customs. They consent 
with an impure age. Their principles have a semblance of 
right-heartedness and truth. Their conduct has a semblance of 
disinterestedness and purity. All men are pleased with them, 
and they think themselves right, so that it is impossible to 
proceed with them to the principles of Yaou and Shun. On 
this account they are called ‘‘ The thieves of virtue.” ’ 

*‘ Confucius said, ‘ [ hate a semblance which is not the reality. 
I hate the darnel, lest it be confounded with the corn. I hate 
glib-tonguedness, lest it be confounded with righteousness. I 
hate sharpness of tongue, lest it be confounded with sincerity. 
I hate the music of Ch’ing, lest it be confounded with the true 
music. I hate the reddish-blue, lest it be confounded with ver- 
milion. I hate your good, careful men of the villages, lest they 
be confounded with the truly virtuous.’ ”’ % 


The basis of morals, then, is the intrinsic desirability of a 
eat ideal which accords’ with the true’ principles of man’s_ 
nature when brought to their due development” by proper 
education. To such an ideal man must hold fast in spite of 
“all that fortune or his fellow-men can do to him, and that 
will be ‘best for him in that he so remains lord of himself" Tn” 
“80 “doing he keeps the appointment of heaven, yet_his.reward... 
‘is nothing external to the-act-itself,.but.consists-merely-in--the 





pecnaruat 


3. In what outward conduct does this ideal show itself ? 
Generally speaking, in the conduct of the good citizen, the dutiful 
son, the kindly neighbour and, in particular, the upright official 
who would resist to the death the corrupt tyrant. Uprightness 


1 Analects, Book V. chap. xxvii. 2 1b., Book XVII. chap. xiii. 
3 Mencius, Book VII. part ii. chap. xxxvii. secs. 10, 11, 12. 


Sea e of. the life lived in accordance with the_ best... 


— 


532 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


and benevolence are the two master-words. Confucius accepted 
and re-constituted the traditional standard of Chinese ethics 
with its closely linked family ties and its patriarchal relations 
of ruler and subject. He calls himself a transmitter and not a 
maker, believing in and loving the Ancients.1_ Hence he insists 
repeatedly upon a conception of filial devotion which to the 
Western mind appears exaggerated. He finds the standard of 
conduct frequently in those rules of, propriety which belong to 
ancient tradition, and prescribe the requisite term of mourning 
for the cult of the dead, the due order of precedence among 
relations, a ceremonial etiquette as between the prince and his 
officers, and so forth. In the Book of Rites he is, generally 
speaking, moderate and reasonable in his interpretation of 
customary rules;? but, considering the incubus which the cult 
of the dead has imposed upon industrial life in China, it is to be 
regretted that he did not apply himself more resolutely to 
inquiring into the grounds of custom, and teaching men that its 
authority rests only upon its value in the social life of mankind. 
He is very clear that the requirements of virtue are not satisfied 
by mere outward conformity. In mourning, for instance, the 
feeling of grief was a far more essential matter than the form in 
which it was expressed,? and again, outward conformity to law 
may be secured by punishment, but this is not a moral education 
of the people, but, on the contrary, a corrupt influence. “If 
the people be led by laws and uniformity sought to be given 
them by punishments, they will try to avoid the punishment 
but have no sense of shame; if they be led by virtue, and uni- 
formity sought to be given them by the rules of propriety, they 
will have the sense of shame, and moreover will become good.”’ 4 

Confucius, therefore, held by tradition,and_advanced—no_ 
reasoned theory--of the rules-of conduct. Yet certain funda- 
mentals appear. Virtue must comefrom the. good-will. While 


the ‘rules of propristy~-venerally supply the detail, the broad 


principles of conduct are those which follow from the conception 
of oneself asthe servant of mankind, and of social happiness as 
the supreme end of endeavour for the individual. For example, 
we are told that Tsze-ch’an had four of the characteristics of 
the superior man; “in his conduct of himself he was humble, 
in serving his superiors he was respectful, in nourishing the 
people he was kind, in ordering the people he was just.””"5> Again, 
perfect virtue is ““when you go abroad to behave to every one 


1 Analects, Book Vil. éhap. i. 2 De Groot, ii. 662, ete. 
3 Analects, Book III. chap. iv. 4 7b., Book II. chap. iii. 
5 1b., Book V. chap. xv. 


ETHICAL IDEALISM 533 


as if you were receiving a great guest; to employ the people as 
if you were assisting at a great sacrifice; not to do to others 
as you would not wish done to yourself; to have no murmuring 
against you in the country and none in the family.”1 The 
virtues of the sage are acquired for the happiness of the world 
at large. ‘“*'Tsze-loo asked what constituted the superior man.” 
The Master said, “The cultivation of himself in reverential 
carefulness.” “‘ And is this all?” said Tsze-loo. ‘“‘ He cuiti- 
vates himself so as to give rest to others.” ... “Is this all?” 
asked T’sze-loo. The Master said, ‘“‘ He cultivates himself so as 
to give rest to all the people.” 2 In the practice of benevolence 
the family relations come first. Benevolence is the character- 
istic element of humanity and the great exercise of it is in loving 
relations. Righteousness is the acting in accordance with what 
is right and the great exercise of it is in honouring the worthy. 
The decreasing measures of the love due to relatives and the 
steps in the honour due to the worthy are produced by the 
principles of propriety. Indeed, Confucius’s simple and some- 
what elementary political philosophy rests on his conception of 
the family as the type and exemplar of the state. ‘‘ There is 
filial piety, therewith the sovereign should be served; there is 
fraternal submission, therewith the elders and superiors should 
be served ; there is kindness, therewith the multitude should be 
treated.’’* Thus, the Confucian rule of benevolence is not a 
mere abstract principle, but one regulated in its application by 
well-understood duties depending on a man’s position in his 
family or in the state. It is moreover always conceived in close 
connection with justice. The “golden rule”’ to treat others as 
we would have them treat us, which Confucius was the first to 
formulate, is as much a matter of justice as of benevolence. It 
is a rule of impartiality as between self and others. Tsze-kung 
asked, ‘‘ Is there one word which may serve as a rule of practice 
for all one’s life?’ The Master said, “Is not reciprocity such 
a word? What you do not want done to yourself do not do to 
others.’’5 Benevolence, indeed, should be universal,® but there 
must be a rule of justice in applying it. We should forgive 
injuries, but we should not push that principle to the point of 
treating the evil and the good alike. The philosopher Lao Tse 
had urged that instead of returning evil for evil we should 
recompense evil with kindness. Being asked what he thought 
of this principle, the Master said, “* With what, then, will you 


1 Analects, Book XII. chap. ii. 2 4b., Book XIV. chap. xlv. 
3 Doctrine of the Mean, chap. xx.sec.5. ‘4 The Great Learning, chap. ix. 
5 Analects, Book XV. chap. xxiii. § ib., Book XII. chap. xxii.. 


534 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


recompense kindness? Recompense injury with justice and 
recompense kindness with kindness.”?4 But this is not to be 
taken as justifying vengeance. ‘“‘To show forbearance and 
gentleness in teaching others and not to revenge unreasonable 
conduct, this is the forcefulness of Southern regions and the 
good man makes it his study.” ? 

Such then, in brief, is the code of private life. To live in 
the service of mankind, to respect parents and superiors, to be 
kind and helpful to those in need, to have no enemies, to for- 
bear with the offender and forgive him within the limits of 
justice, to be prepared to love all men, to hate only those who 
slander others and thrust themselves forward against all social 
tradition,® to serve a good ruler but withstand him to his face 
if he is bad, to undergo privation and, if necessary, death for a 
moral principle, to be grieved and feel pity for the criminal 
instead of triumphing over him,* not to withdraw from the 
world, to realize that man’s life is to be lived in the midst of 
humanity whatever the difficulties and drawbacks may be, and 
in all these things to recognize that the beginning and the end 
is Sincerity '—such is the ideal of personal conduct that Confucius 
taught to China. 

The ideal of public conduct is like unto it. In fact, through- 
out Confucius is talking with officials, addressing men who hold 
office and who are concerned with the problems of conscience 
arising in connection with the tenure of office, with the duties 
of the king and the relation of king and officer. Throughout 
he insists upon the duty of prince to people. The relationship 
should be that of father to children. The first duty of the 
prince is to order his own conduct aright, and to show in his 
own household those principles of family life upon which the 
structure of Chinese society was held to depend; from his 
example outwards the influence would radiate. When Ke-K’ang 
asked about government Confucius replied, “To govern means 
to rectify. If you lead on the people with correctness who will 
dare not to be correct ?’’® And when Ke-K’ang was distressed 
by the number of thieves, Confucius replied with much direct- 
ness, “‘If you, Sir, were not covetous, although you should 
reward them to do it they would not steal.’”?? The people are 
by nature disposed to virtue; they break out into mutiny only 
in times of distress. The duty of the prince is to keep down 


1 Analects, Book XIV. chap. xxxvi. 2 Doctrine of the Mean, chap. x. 
3 Analects, Book XVII. chap. xxiv. * 4b., Book XIX. chap. xix. 
y Doctrine of the Mean, chap. xxv. 


Analects, Book XII. chap. xvii. 7 4b., Book XII. chap. XViil. 


ETHICAL IDEALISM 535 


taxation, avoid harsh punishments and excessive forced labour. 
When the people are numerous what next is to be done for 
them? The answer is, ‘‘ Enrich them.” ‘‘ And when they have 
been enriched?”’ “Teach them.’’? The virtuous and wise 
prince is able to dispense with punishment. “Sir, in carrying 
on your government why should you use killing at all? Let 
your evinced desires be for what is good and the people will be 
good. . . . The grass must bend when the wind blows over it.” ? 
A succession of good governors lasting over a century would be 
able to transform the violently bad and dispense with capital 
punishment.* In accordance with the doctrine of universal 
benevolence the people are the first object in the state. The 
king is their servant, and that sovereign is most praised who 
takes upon himself the sins of the people and is responsible for 
them to heaven.. We have here, in short, a theory of conduct 
which is at the same time a theory of society, elementary no 
doubt, especially in its political aspect, yet the foundation 
of that cultivated class which has for two thousand years 
governed China and kept Chinese civilization erect through all 
its vicissitudes. 


4. The teaching of Confucius was further developed by the 
greatest disciple of his school, the philosopher Mencius (371- 
288 B.c.). Mencius made no entirely new departure, but put 
the moral theory of Confucius in a more systematic form, stated 
many of the Master’s fundamental positions with a vigour and 
incisiveness that were entirely his own, and laid special stress 
on certain sides of political morality, such as the inherent wicked- 
ness of militarism, and the right of rebellion against a vicious 
sovereign. With him again virtue is the supreme end of life. 
Perfect uprightness alone casteth out fear. He attributes to 
“the Master’ a saying, “If on self-examination I find that I 
am not upright, shall I not be in fear even of a poor man in 


his loose garments of hair-cloth? If on self-examination I find 


that I am upright, I will go forward against thousands and tens 
of thousands.” § He who knows his own nature, knows heaven, 
and ‘‘to preserve one’s mental constitution and nourish one’s 
nature is the way to serve Heaven.’ Heaven has its appoint- 
ments which we should accept instinctively, but this is not to 
lead us into fatalism. 

1 Cf. Doctrine of the Mean, chap. xx. 14. * Analects, Book XIII. chap. ix. 

3 4b., Book XII. chap. xix. 4 +b., Book XIII. chap. xi. 

5 1b., Book XX. chap. 1. see. 3. 


6 Mencius, Book II. part i. chap. ii. see. 7. 
* 4b., Book VII. part i. chap. i. 


536 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


‘He who has the true idea of what is heaven’s appointment 
will not stand beneath a precipitous wall. 

‘* Death sustained in the discharge of one’s duties may correctly 
be ascribed to the appointment of heaven. | 
‘Death under handcuffs and fetters cannot correctly be so 
ascribed.”’ 1 


The other elements of happiness depend on virtue. Being 
asked by King Hwuy whether wise and good princes find pleasure 
in geese and deer, Mencius replied, ‘‘ Being wise and good they 
have pleasure in these things. If they are not wise and good, 
though they have these things, they do not find pleasure.” ? 

“To dwell in the wide house of the world, to stand in the 
correct seat of the world, and to walk in the great path of the 
world; when he obtains his desire for office, to practise his 
principles for the good of the people; and when that desire is 
disappointed, to practise them alone; to be above the power of 
riches and honours to make dissipated, of poverty and mean 
condition to make swerve from principle, and of power and force 
to make bend,’’? such in a few words are the life and character 
of the great man. His principles allow of no compromise. 
“Never has a man who has bent himself been able to make 
others straight.”’ 4 


5. Man must.belord of himself... But in the pursuit of virtue — 
he is doing no violence to himself. He _is_ merely _ fulfilling, 
‘bringing to the perfection.of development the seeds of of good _ 
implanted in him by nature. Here the teaching “of. i Mencius 137 18 
more distinct than that of his master, and contains the germs _ 
of a scientific theory of moral psychology,. The foundation of 
virtue is in the “ passion-nature ’’ which occupies a position in 
the soul somewhat analogous to that of the @yoedés in Plato’s 
scheme. The “ passion-nature’’ needs guidance and its natural 
leader is the will,® directed as we collect from other passages by 
education and the “rules of propriety.” But this will must 
lead and not force, just as the ruler should not subdue men by 
violence but win their hearts by virtue. Or, in a different 
metaphor, the “ passion-nature ’’ must be weeded, not pulled 
up.® For the feelings are the foundation of the virtues. “The 
feeling of commiseration is the principle of benevolence. The 
feeling of shame and dislike is the principle of righteousness. 
The feeling of modesty and complaisance is the principle of 

! Mencius, Book VII. part i. chap. ii. 

* 7b., Book I. parti. chap. ii. see. 2. 

3 7b., Book ITI. part ii. chap. 2. sec. 3. 


‘ ib., Book III. part ii. chap. i. see. 5. 
° 2b., Book II. part i. chap. ii. 6 7b., Book II. parti. chap. i. sec. 16. 


ETHICAL IDEALISM 537 


propriety. The feeling of approving and disapproving is the 
principle of knowledge. Men have these four principles as they 
have their four limbs,”’ and those who say they cannot develop 
them play the thief with themselves.1 “‘ All men have a mind 
which cannot bear to see the sufferings of others.” 2 “‘ Even 
nowadays,” if we saw a child about to fall into a well, we should 
experience alarm and distress, not from any desire for the favour 
of its parents, nor from any love of praise, but because com- 
miseration is essential to man.’ Only as we saw above ‘ in the 
story of King Seuen, it is the misery that we see that afiects us, 
and our imaginations are not vivid enough to make us feel the 
pain that we do not see. What is needed is development of the 
good material that is in man. Let the four principles “ have 
their complete development and they will suffice to love and 
protect all within the four seas. Let them be denied that 
development and they will not suffice for a man to serve his 
parents with.” ® These principles are not infused into us from 
without. “‘Seek and you will find them. Neglect and you 
will lose them.” ® But men differ much in the cultivation 


1 Mencius, Book II. part i. chap. vi. 2 ¢b., Book II. part i. chap. vi. 

3 Loc. cit. 4 Part I. chap. vi. 

5 Book II. part i. chap. ii, Elsewhere (Book VI. part i. chap. i.) a 
dialogue occurs between Mencius and Kaou, which Kaou begins by suggest- 
ing that righteousness is to man’s nature as a cup to willow wood. Mencius 
objects that this implies that violence must be done to humanity to convert 
it to righteousness. Kaou then compares human nature to water, which 
flows east or west according as a channel is opened for it. Mencius replies 
that “‘ the tendency of man’s nature to good is like the tendency of water 
to flow downwards.” Kaou then draws a distinction between Righteous- 
ness as external and Benevolence as internal. I honour an old man not 
because there is a principle of reverence in men, but just as when I see a 
white man I consider him white. Kaou is here taking up a position some- 
what analogous to that of the “‘ moral sense ” school. Mencius’s reply is 
to the effect that whiteness is a quality common toa manandahorse. We 
do not honour an aged horse; nor is there any righteousness in the age of a 
man, but in our honouring it (7. e. righteousness is not a perceptible quality 
of things, but lies in a relation of ourselves to other persons). Kaou then 
says that he loves his younger brother, but not the younger brother of a 
man of Tsin—the feeling is therefore determined by himself, internal 
(subjective). On the other hand, he honours an old man whether of his 
own people or of Ts’o00. Therefore this (a point of righteousness) is external. 
Mencius replies that we enjoy roast meat, whether roasted by ourselves or 
men of Tsin. Would Kaou say that our enjoyment of roast meat is 
external? The discussion is as interesting as the examples are quaint. 
Kaou is contending for the objectivity of the moral standard as contrasted 
with the subjective variations of good feeling; Mencius for the subjectivity 
of all morals, in the sense that they proceed from and rest on human nature. 
The solution is perhaps to be found in the Kantian distinction between 
subjective as = the necessary laws of a subject, 7. e. of a rational being, 
and as = the individual variations which make up a man’s idiosyncrasies. 

§ Mencius, Book VI. part i. chap. vi. sec. 7. 


538 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


of them, and what is needed is to work on the basis of good 
which exists in all and extend it! so as to cover the whole of 
life and achieve that universal benevolence which is “ the most 
honourable dignity conferred by Heaven.”’ # 

Benevolence and righteousness are the leading notes. of the 
character that is fully developed. Not indeed that benevolence. 
should be equally apportioned to all men. Natural ties have_ 
their place. The philosopher Mih taught that we should. Jove 
all equal: which is contrary. to filial auty. but _“‘ To re 


1 “ All men have some things which they cannot bear; extend that 
feeling to what they can bear, and benevolence will be the result. All men 
have some things which they will not do; extend that feeling to the things 
which they do, and righteousness will be the result. 

‘‘ Tf a man can give full development to the feeling which makes him 
shrink from injuring others, his benevolence will be more than can be 
called into practice. If he can give full development to the feeling which 
refuses to break through or jump over a wall, his righteousness will be 
more than can be called into practice. 

‘* Tf he can give full development to the real feeling of dislike with which 
he receives the salutation, ‘ Thou,’ ‘ Thou,’ he will act righteously in all 
places and circumstances * (Book VIL. part ii. chap. 31, secs. 1-3). 

In more modern phrase, one might say that every man “has his code.” 
In that code lie concealed impulses which, adequately developed, would 
furnish a perfect character. By it are inferred principles which, consistently 
carried out, would suffice for a saint. Thieves’ honour recognizes a prin- 
ciple which the thief applies only to his fellow-thieves. If he applies it 
without any such arbitrary restrictions, he must become an honest man. 

2 Book II. part i. chap. vii. sec. 2. 

3 Mencius, Book III. part ii. chap. ix. sec. 9. Mih’s expression of the 
doctrine of universal benevolence was of the most sweeping kind. “It is 
this principle of making distinctions between man and man which gives 
rise to all that is most injurious in the empire ”’ (Legge, ii., Prolegomena, 
p. 111). Mih seeks to turn the objection that the doctrine is contrary to 
filial piety by urging that by loving and serving others a man will obtain 
their love and benefits for his parents (7b., pp. 105-119). Miuh’s practical 
polemic was directed against the excessive burden thrown on Chinese life 
by the laws of mourning, and the classical philosophy, as De Groot’s account 
clearly shows, erred by adhering too closely to the traditional observance. 

Mencius follows closely the typical Chinese view in the extension of the 
principle of filial piety to cover all forms of wrong-doing that might 
indirectly injure parents, and in exalting it to the disparagement of 
duties to wife and child. Thus he enumerates five common things which 
are unfilial. 1. Laziness. 2. Gambling, chess-playing and wine-bibbing. 
3. Love of money and selfish attachment to wife and child—these three 
when followed to the point of neglect of parents. 4. Following the desire 
of eyes and ears so as to bring parents into disgrace. 5. Being fond of 
bravery, fighting and quarrelling so as to endanger parents (Book IV. 
part ii. chap. xxx.). He holds up for imitation the example of Chang, who, 
because his father was offended, sent away his wife and child, and all his 
life received no cherishing attention from them (7b., sec. 5). There is, of 
course, another point of view—that of Chang’s wife and child and the 
attention that they might expect. The Western world puts them first 
the Chinese second longo tntervallo. 





ETHICAL IDEALISM 539 


.__Human excellence lies_in the.performance.of.the-social-duties. 
. The life of the hermit is like that of an earth-worm,’ The sage 
learns humbly from others. ‘‘ When any one ‘told Tsze-loo that 
he had a fault, he rejoiced,’’ and Shun “‘ regarded virtue as the 
common property of himself and others, giving up his own way 
to follow that of others, and delighting to learn from others to 
practice what was good.’ Though it is the duty of the sage to 
teach as well as learn, yet there is a pitfall here. ‘‘ The evil of 
men is that they like to be teachers of others.” * As to the 
conventions, Mencius holds by the “rules of propriety,” but 
sometimes not without symptoms of impatience. A stickler for 
strict rule would not a touch a woman’s hand even to save her 
from drowning. Such aman, says Mencius curtly, is a ‘‘ wolf.’ 4 
The intrinsic importance of the rule must be taken into account, 
and also the urgency of the motive for casting it aside.6 Had 
this principle been developed, it would have broken the crust 
of Chinese formalism and opened the way for a richness of 
spiritual growth which, crusted over by tradition as it has been 
from the first, Confucianism has never brought forth. 


6. But it is in its political applications that the ethical teach-_ 
_ing of Mencius is most thoroughgoing, Here. the. principles.of 
justice.and.benevolence require that the welfare of the people 
-~should..be..the..first.consideration.of government. ‘The people 
are the most important element in a nation, the spirits of the 
land and grain are the next, the sovereign is the lightest.”"® The 
people’s will practically expressed in unanimous support of, 
or aversion to, a ruler is of divine authority. “‘ Heaven sees 
according as my people see: Heaven hears according as my 
people hear.’”’? The king must care for their prosperity. He 
should refrain from interfering with husbandry, spare the 
growing trees and the young fish, plant mulberry-trees about 
the homesteads and inculcate filial and paternal duties in the 
schools. A ruler so governing his state would certainly become 
emperor. Instead of this he says severely to a prince— 


“Your dogs and swine eat the food of men, and you do not 
know to make any restrictive arrangements. There are people 
dying from famine on the roads, and you do not know to issue the 
stores of your granaries for them. When people die, you say, 
‘It is not owing to me; it is owing to the year.’ In what does 


1 Book III. part ii. chap. x. 2 Book II. part i. chap. viii. 

* Book IV. part i. chap. xxiii. 

“ 1b., chap. xvii. Cf. Douglas, Soetety in China, p. 189. 

5 Book VI. part li. chap. 1. § Mencius, Book VII. part ii. ehap. xiv. 
7 Book VY. part i. chap. v. sec. 8. 


540 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


this differ from stabbing a man and killing him, and then saying, 
‘It was not I; it was the weapon?’ Let your Majesty cease to 
lay the blame on the year, and instantly from all the empire the 
people will come to you.... 

“In your kitchen there is fat meat; in your stables there are 
fat horses. But your people have the look of hunger, and on the 
wilds there are those who have died of famine. This is leading 
on beasts to devour men.” 


Lighter taxation, care for the poor and childless, the Bums... 
ment of corrupt. officials, moderation in punishments 
the principle of collective responsibility, attention to works of _ 
public necéssity, and, above all, aversion. to..we 
marks of the good ruler. In the good old days of King Wan— 


‘“* The husbandmen cultivated for the government one-ninth of 
the land; the descendants of officers were salaried; at the passes 
and in the markets strangers were inspected, but goods were not 
taxed; there were no prohibitions respecting the ponds and weirs; 
the wives and children of criminals were not involved in their 
guilt. There were the old and wifeless, or widowers; the old 
and husbandless, or widows; the old and childless, or solitaries ; 
the young and fatherless, or orphans—these four classes are the 
most destitute of the people, and have none to whom they can 
tell their wants, and King Wan, in the institution of his govern- 
ment with its benevolent action, made them the first objects of 
his regard.” ? 


1 Book I. part i. chap. ill. sec. 5; chap. iv. sec. 4. 

* Mencius, Book I. part ii. chap. v. sec, 3. The whole theory of govern- 
ment is somewhat more fully stated in Book VI. part ii. chap. vii. : “‘ The 
five chiefs of the princes were sinners against the three kings. The princes 
of the present day are sinners against the five chiefs. The great officers 
of the present day are sinners against the princes.’ 

** The emperor visited the princes, which was called ‘ A tour of inspection.’ 
The princes attended at the court of the emperor, which was called ‘ Giving 
a report of office.’ It was a custom in the spring to examine the ploughing, 
and supply any deficiency of seed, and in autumn to examine the reaping, 
and assist where there was a deficiency of the crop. When the emperor 
entered the boundaries of a state, if the new ground was being reclaimed 
and the old fields well cultivated; if the old were nourished and the worthy 
honoured; and if men of distinguished talents were placed in office: then 
the prince was rewarded—rewarded with an addition to his territory. On 
the other hand, if, on entering a state, the ground was found left wild or 
overrun with weeds ; if the old were neglected and the worthy unhonoured ; 
and if the offices were filled with hard tax-gatherers: then the prince was 
reprimanded. If a prince once omitted his attendance at court, he was 
punished by degradation of rank; if he did so a second time, he was de- 
prived of a portion of his territory; if he did so a third time, the imperial 
forces were set in motion, and-he was removed from his government. Thus 
the emperor commanded the punishment, but did not himself inflict it, 
while the princes inflicted the punishment, but did not command it. The 


ETHICAL IDEALISM 541 


It is on the conditions of life that the behaviour of the people 
depends. Human beings have a naturally good disposition, but 
not one strong enough to resist the trials of adverse conditions, 
especially when these are due to unjust laws. Bad governments 
goad the people to crime and then punish them. “ This is to 
entrap the people.’’! If the king failed in his duty his chief 
ministers should remonstrate with him, and if repeated remon- 
strance proved fruitless, they should dethrone him. So Mencius 
told King Seuen to his face.2 In the last resort the minister 
should put the king to death.* For all this of the duties of the 
king is not to be mere exhortation as in most preaching of the 
kind. It was meant in earnest, and behind it lies the sanction 
of just rebellion. 

Infact, we feel throughout.that.Mencius’s.sayings are the_ 
_very reverse of ordinary moral platitudes. They are truths 
~applicablé to-all time, but not_empty, as such truths t00- often... 
_are... On.the.contrary, they have a sting which we.can feel even 
oe ee present ay, on ought to feel if we.do not. The gréat 
~ Chinese classical writers,in. fact,.laid the foundation.of.a..distinct.... 
_ ethical and_.social.ideal,..in..many. ways..analogous..to..the.best.. 

teaching of the founders of spiritual religions, but different in_... 





five chiefs, however, dragged the princes to punish other princes, and hence 
I say that they were sinners against the three kings. 

“Of the five chiefs the most powerful was the duke Hwan. At the 
assembly of the princes in K’wei-k’ew, he bound the victim and placed the 
writing upon it, but did not slay it to smear their mouths with the blood. 
The first injunction in their agreement was: ‘Slay the unfilial; change 
not the son who has been appointed heir; exalt not a concubine to the 
rank of wife.’ The second was: ‘ Honour the worthy, and maintain the 
talented, to give distinction to the virtuous.’ The third was: ‘ Respect 
the old, and be kind to the young. Be not forgetful of strangers and 
travellers.’ The fourth was: ‘Let not offices be hereditary, nor let 
officers be pluralists. In the selection of officers let the object be to get the 
proper men. Let not a ruler take it on himself to put to death a great 
officer.’ The fifth was: ‘ Follow no crooked policy in making embank- 
ments. Impose no restrictions on the sale of grain. Let there be no 
promotions without first announcing them to the emperor.’ It was then 
said, ‘ All we who have united in this agreement shall hereafter maintain 
amicable relations.’ The princes of the present day all violate these five 
prohibitions, and therefore I say that the princes of the present day are 
sinners against the five chiefs.” 

Note the relationship of the emperor to the princes, a feudal relationship 
to which Mencius seeks to give an ideal ethical form; the supervision by 
the state of family relationship; the insistence on the distinction of chief 
wife and concubine; and the idea of purity and merit in official life. 

1 Mencius, Book I. part i. chap. vii. If this view sounds somewhat 
materialistic, we may set against it passages like Book III. part i. chap. iv. 
If men “are well fed, warmly clad, and comfortably lodged, without being 
taught at the same time, they become almost like the beasts.” 

2 Book V. part ii. chap. ix. 3’ Book I. part ii. chap. viii. 


542 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


PERS en eee i agi 


remained, except in so far as influenced by. Buddhism, a form 
of animism, distinguished first by its systematic character—a 
multitude of spirits dependent on those of Heaven and Earth 
respectively ; and secondly, by the remarkable development of _ 
ancestor worship. This religion offered little scope for ethical 
idealism except at two points—the idealization of family con-_ 
tinuity, and the supremacy.of Héaveti>~Of both these points 
Chinese ethical writers took advantage ; of the first to re-enforce 
the doctrine of filial piety; of the second to insist on the moral 
unity of the empire. But in the main their concern was social 
salvation, and they were deliberately working out an ethical 
theory to contribute to that end, and appealing to the nature 
and training of individuals to use the means by which the end 
was to be reached. Thus the psychological basis of conduct and 
the conception of its ultimate end are not those of Buddhism or 
of Monotheism. For example, man is not inherently bad and 
redeemed from evil only by divine grace. In himself he is 
potentially good, and the germs of goodness in him only need 
favourable circumstances, teaching, and effort to come to perfec- 
tion. But they are developed, not to the greater glory of God, 
but to the maintenance of human life, that all along the rich 
valleys with their million homesteads the husbandman may 
reap the harvest he has sown in fields unstained by blood, that 
he may cherish wife and child and be nurtured by them in age, 
and pass duly honoured to the tomb; that worthy officers be 
found to serve just and benevolent kings; that wars may die 
away; that crime may be repressed, not by punishment, but by 
the example of virtue; in a word, that peaceful industry and 
happy family life undisturbed by civil jars, official corruption, 
royal avarice, and military ambition, may be the lot of one-third 
of the human race. Not the glory of God, but the peace of man > 
is the aim; not good fortune here nor salvation hereafter is the 
disciple’s reward, but merely his own best self independent of 
all that comes— righteousness for its own sake, benevolence 
because it is itself the best gift of heaven. Not the chaining up 
of human nature, but its full and harmonious development is the 
object of ethical training. In other respects the ethical and 
the religious ideals of character are more remarkable for their 
correspondence than for their divergence. The modesty of the 
sage is not perhaps drawn in such bold lines as the humility of 
the saint. Forbearance and forgiveness are upheld as better 
than revenge, but the returning of good for evil is set aside in 
favour of a severer application of justice. Benevolence should 


its.setting. Chinese_religion was at this time and has. sinc 


= A Prete Si 


ETHICAL IDEALISM 543 


_ be for mankind generally, but for our own families first. In all 


this there is some infusion of practical sense which may not un- 


fairly be set against the loss of the romantic glow. Perhaps, if 


we may strike a balance, there was less to stir the brain’s blood, 
and so set men thinking and working towards wider problems yet 
and deeper solutions. But there was a definite theory of conduct 
appealing to the best of man’s nature and calling him to the 
service of his fellow-men, and this theory has for more than two 
thousand years formed the actual working basis of life for a great 
division of the human race. 


1 Universalism, indeed, is not so prominent as in Mohammedan and 
Christian ethics. The Confucians were thinking and writing for a homo- 
geneous people among whom the divisions were those of a decaying feudal 
system. They speak of mankind in general terms, but they have no sharp 
distinctions of race to overcome. They refer occasionally to the outlying 
barbarous tribes which will be “ attracted’? by good government, or in- 
fluenced by civilized teaching. But the fate of these peoples plays no 
important part in their minds. Nor were class divisions a serious problem 
for them. Confucius lays down that “‘ there being instruction there will 
be no distinction of classes”? (Analects, Book XV. chap. xxxviii.).. Un- 
doubtedly they stand for the Chinese community as one great whole, but— 
from the nature of their historical position—they can hardly be said to have 
conceived Humanity as has been done in Western thought. 


CHAPTER VI 
PHILOSOPHIC ETHICS 


1. THE profound conception of the Ethical basis taught by 
_ the great Chinese thinkers was arrived at independently by a 
movement of thought arising at about the same period of time, 
but in a distant part of the world, and under deeply contrasted 
conditions of culture. The great Greek philosophers from the 
fifth century B.c. onwards, worked out a theory of life in which 
the inherent excellence of good conduct, the strength and self- 
dependence of the disciplined character, the order and harmony 
of the well-governed state, were held up as ends of human actions 
sufficient in themselves to inspire effort and justify self-sacrifice, 
worthy to be followed by every man even if in doing so he 
*“‘ should escape the notice of gods and men.”’ But in speaking 
of Greek thought and its distinctive message—and it is only 
what is distinctive and that only in the barest outline that can 
be touched on here—we must recognize at the outset that its 
method was no less important than its results. The Chinese 
masters inculcated some profound truths and arrived at results 
often closely similar to the best teaching of the Greeks. But 
they seem to have laid them down almost as dogmatically and 
with as little attempt at rational proof as though they had been 
dogmas of theology. Certainly there is but little trace of system 
in Confucius and not much more even in Mencius. They made 
little attempt, it would seem, to go back to first principles and 
ask the why and wherefore of all moral rules. Hence they were 
moral teachers rather than philosophers, and hence also in the 
practical result they accepted only too much of Chinese tradition, 
and left their country, after all, bound in the fetters of antiquity. 

With the Greeks, on the contrary, moral philosophy begins 
its course. With the early thinkers, contemporaries or perhaps 
predecessors of Socrates, who propounded the question “ What 
is the Good, the end of human life, the aim which a thinking 
being should set before him as the goal of his existence ? ’’ there 
begins a new epoch in moral development, the epoch in which 
the ethical consciousness; long dominated by the forces which 
shape its conceptions unawares, begins to re-act upon them, to 

544 


PHILOSOPHIC ETHICS 545 


turn round upon the conditions that have hitherto determined 
its growth and inquire into their why and wherefore. This 
is part of a movement which extends far beyond the sphere 
of ethics and attacks the very foundations of knowledge and 
belief. 

Its own processes and methods, the principles and presup- 
positions of all its thinking, are the last things of which the mind 
becomes conscious. In the earliest stages of its development 
in humanity it forms ideas under the stimulus of experience 
by methods which have all the roughness and imperfection 
of hereditary or instinctive reactions unpolished by rational 
reflection. The ideas themselves are loose and slippery. They 
are linked one with another, not by any coherent logic, but as 
the vague impulses of casual association suggest, or as emotional 
conditions predispose the imagination to impute connections 
between events. It is out of this chance-medley of mental forces 
that the ideas of primitive fancy are evolved. 

We have seen how the advance of intelligence brings some 
order into this chaos, how in the building up of thought casual 
suggestion is replaced by systematic meditation in which trained 
reasoning and methodical analysis play their part. We have 
seen how under these influences the naive imagery of the childish 
mind yields to the profound conception of the sage, in which 
finally the structural categories underlying all experience are 
brought clearly before consciousness, and utilized in the con- 
struction of a philosophy of things. 

In such a construction there is undoubtedly implied a certain 
criticism both of the conceptions formed and of the methods by 
which they are formed. Yet underlying it all are assumptions 
which are only brought to light by a still more fundamental 
criticism, the criticism wherein thought seeks to determine its 
own value as a measure of reality. Consider, for example, the 
question of logical method. Criticism may have shown some 
reasoning to be fallacious, and other reasoning to be apparently 
sound. But what is this appearance? Is it, after all, only an 
impression made on us, which we accept as convincing because 
we cannot resist it? But if so, what is its worth? The fallacy 
also impressed us till some one pointed out the flaw, and perhaps 
it still impresses other minds and seems as sound to them as it 
appears absurd to us. Is there, then, any more objective or 
absolute standard of sound logic which, once revealed, would 
settle all doubts, and if so, how are we to know it? Again, 
suppose our logic is sound so that we may unerringly connect 
concept with concept, what precisely is the value of it all at the 
NN 


546 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


end? We may forge a perfect chain of logical links, but what 
does it hang from? Is it suspended in mid-air, or are there first 
principles fixed in the adamantine firmament, or possibly solid 
supports reared on earth, from which the chain may hang ? 
Does thought form a world of its own, or does it relate to an 
independent reality, and if so, how is the relation established 
and its validity guaranteed? Questions such as these, never 
finally resolved, but constantly renewed with deeper meanings 
and more subtle suggestions, form the permanent content of 
the philosophic criticism of thought. 

This criticism, being directed throughout to the discovery of 
an “objective ’ standard which is to rescue truth from the 
fallibility of ordinary human weakness, must, in the first 
place, concern itself with method. It will evolve a logic to 
justify the distinction of the sound from the unsound in reason- 
ing, and systematize valid argument on some connected and 
coherent principles. Secondly, it will inquire into the genesis 
of our conceptions and will test them by reference to the ex- 
perience from which they are educed. Then, applying these 
methods, it will seek to reconstruct its conception of Reality. 
The Socratic Elenchus (notwithstanding the limits which Socrates 
imposed on himself), the Platonic Dialectic, the Aristotelian 
Logic and Metaphysics, were successive attempts in this direction. 
The reconstruction of Reality on the basis of a criticism of first 
principles was in fact first seriously taken in hand by the Greeks. 
But in the progress of criticism a problem emerges affecting the 
bare possibility of Reconstruction—a problem which can hardly 
be said to have come fully within the purview of Greek thought. 
The mind itself may be regarded as a product of the Reality 
which it seeks to understand. Or, conversely, the world of 
experience may be regarded as a product of the Mind. Its 
sensations, its conceptions, its methods, its principles, the very 
self-criticism by which it has been seeking to rectify its principles, 
may all be results of its own growth and dependent for their 
peculiar shape on its own development. If this is so, must not 
the ultimate result of the philosophical movement, however far 
it may push its criticism of knowledge, still lie within the circle 
of the mind’s own making? Will not the truth that satisfies us 
still be a truth for ourselves alone, or if it is more, how can we 
be assured of it? Truth is truth, but does it give us Reality ? 
To determine this question we must “‘ know ourselves”’ in a new 
sense. We must ascertain the facts as to the constitution and 
growth of the mind. We must re-examine the very conceptions 
of Truth and Reality. We must determine the conditions under 


PHILOSOPHIC ETHICS a Bae 


which knowledge is possible, we must ascertain the limitations 
under which thought arises and ask how far those limitations 
are overcome. To attempt this more thoroughgoing evaluation 
of the subjective factor in knowledge has been the special task 
of modern philosophy. ‘To some aspects of the problem we shall 
return later, confining ourselves in the present chapter to the 
philosophy of the Greeks, and, indeed, to one branch of their 
philosophical development. Their reconstruction of knowledge 
and reformed conceptions of the world-order intimately affected 
their ethical thought, which was, indeed, merely a part of the 
general movement of critical reconstruction, but it is only the 
ethical side of the movement which can be outlined here. 
Indeed, a philosophical reconstruction is by no means less 
necessary in the region of conduct than is that of knowledge. 
On the contrary, rules of conduct have, as a matter of history, 
grown up under conditions eminently unfavourable to a rational 
apprehension of the ethical order best suited to human needs, 
They have arisen under the conditions of group-morality, and 
are tarnished with the brutalities incident to the struggle for 
existence. They have been infected by gross conceptions of 
magical influence and spiritual resentments. They have been 
distorted by the sophistications with which men hide their 
spiritual nakedness. They have been bent into weapons used 
for the justification of class or race supremacy, of arbitrary 
power, of sexual wrong. In no other department are the funda- 
mental categories in such permanent need of criticism. Good 
and bad, right and wrong, virtue and vice—all the elementary 
conceptions forming the pigeon-holes wherein we arrange our 
ideas about conduct, what at bottom do they mean? What is 
their value and justification? What grounds have we in reason 
for the judgments which we pass on conduct when we use them ? 
Are they anything more than expressions for our feelings, or 
have they a higher authority? Is the standard by which we 
apply them final, or, seeing that human standards vary, is there 
any higher standard to which a rational society would conform, 
and if so, how is it to be ascertained? Such are the questions 
of philosophic ethics, and they cut deeper than any simple 
ethical idealism. We have seen ideals of character arising 
under Buddhist, Christian, and Confucian influence, and the 
mere formation of such ideals involves an immense advance in 
reflection. But such ideals are formed by laying stress on 
certain elements of virtue and by seeking to choke up certain 
sources of vice without any systematic inquiry into the meaning 
and object of virtue, without any rational examination of the 


548 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


ultimate purpose and function of human conduct, and therefore 
without any scientific determination of the rules by which it 
should be guided. Such ideals accordingly, though they may 
carry us far beyond the common morality of the average man, 
are not necessarily well adapted to the actual conduct of life 
and the furtherance of human progress. They may even lead 
us further away from the path. The ultimate hope of a rational 
reconstruction of ethics must be to bring us back from the rules 
and ideals that have grown up at random and without any 
thought-out method to the conditions of conduct which a critical 
theory of what is best for humanity may prove to be required. 
The first steps towards such a reconstruction are to be found in 
Greek Ethics, and the resulting movement of thought, main- 
tained with many fluctuations of vigour throughout the period 
of classical antiquity, interrupted though not wholly arrested by 
the revival of the theological conception of ethics, and resumed 
in a new shape in the modern period, engendered the principal 
forms of ethical theory which it remains for us to mention. To 
write the history of the movement would be incompatible with 
the scope of this work. At best, the most fundamental features 
which distinguish this order of ethical conceptions from others 
may be summarily mentioned. 


2. So far as he had a theory at all, the early Greek, as we 
have seen, held to the magico-religious basis of law and morals. 
The Furies punished the parricide. The perjurer or the betrayer 
of his guest aroused the wrath of Zeus. The curse fell upon the 
offender, and would work itself out in the fate of his children, 
if not in his own life. A public offence, as in the celebrated 
case of the Alemzonide, might involve a city in disaster and 
render necessary a public ceremonial of purgation. The wrath 
of Talthybius fell upon the Spartans for their unceremonious 
treatment of the heralds of Darius, and could only be appeased 
by the devotion of two Spartans who voluntarily surrendered 
themselves to the Persian king to deal with as he pleased. But 
stronger, perhaps, than any explicit dread of divine punishment 
was the half-mystical reverence for established law, the eustoms 
written and unwritten of each city, and the common traditions — 
of all Hellas. With the absolute and unquestioned authority 
of established tradition was bound up, as the Greeks felt, in- 
articulately perhaps, but none the less vividly, all that made the 
free civic life of Greece_possible. The Greek citizen was a free 
man because he was governed by law, and the culmination of 
the charges against the tyrant was that he overrode all laws, 


PHILOSOPHIC ETHICS 549 


written and unwritten. To render back to the laws the service 
due to them was the pride of the free Hellene, who contrasted 
his freely rendered service to a constitution supported by 
his own voluntary efforts with the slavish submission of the 
Oriental to the arbitrary will of his master. The attitude of the 
true freeman is nowhere more justly stated than in the words 
which Herodotus puts into the mouth of Demaratus, the ex-king 
of Sparta and an exile at the Persian court, quoted in the first 
part of this work. But perhaps the most complete expression 
of the traditional Greek view is given in the well-known defence 
of Antigone. Creon has tyrannically forbidden the burial of 
her brother. She tells him why she has disregarded his 
proclamation— : 


“It was not Zeus who laid this ordinance on me, nor Justice, 
housemate of the gods below, by whom these laws were laid down 
among men. Nor did I deem thy order of such might that thou, 
a mortal man, shouldst override the unwritten and unshaken 
laws of gods. For these are not things of to-day or yesterday, 
but live for ever, and none know whence they sprang. For 
them I was not minded—not in fear of any man’s pride—to pay 
the penalty among the gods. That I should die, I knew—how 
else ?—even hadst thou made no order, and if before my time I 
die, I call it but a gain.” 


Here the dominant note of truth and right for ever against 
the petty tyrant of a day, who holds mere life and death in his 
hands, blends now with a whisper of a judgment beyond death, 
and a justice that sits as assessor on the judgment-seat in Hades, 
now with a more decided mysticism which makes the traditional 
law supremé, not because it comes from the gods, but because 
it is eternal and its source is lost in the darkness out of which 
things come. 


3. This uncritical acceptance of traditional morality was 
rudely shaken by the negative movement of thought in the fifth 
century. The dialectics of Zeno had shaken the first principles 
of ordinary knowledge. The metaphysics of Heraclitus had 
attacked the testimony of the senses. On the speculative side 
the negative movement culminated in the doctrine of Protagoras, 
that ““man is the measure of all things, of those which are that 
they are, of those which are not that they are not.”’ The appli- 
cation to ethics does not appear to have been made by Protagoras 
himself, but it lay ready to hand and was freely used by some 
of the so-called Sophists, men like the Polus, Callicles and 
Thrasymachus of the Platonic dialogues. If there is no rational 


550 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


ground for our knowledge of nature, how can we expect to find 
any for our theories of the moral life? True, there is law in 
every state, and he who breaks the law will be punished by law, 


but what is the source and authority of law itself? The law 
which the tyrant makes rests, as all men admit, on the strength © 


of his own arm, wherewith he will punish those who break it. 
But in precisely the same way the Law which the ruling Few 
impose on the subject Many rests on the power of Fear, whether 
due to superior valour or better organization, to enforce their 
will; and by precisely the same argument in a democracy the 
law is simply what the majority who are here the stronger 
decide that it shall be. In every case the “ruler,’”’ whether an 
individual or a class, frames the law in his own interest and 


enforces it by his power. Justice is merely a name for the 


“interest of the stronger.’’ Hence it was that the rule of 
justice differed, as the travelled Greeks were discovering, from 
nation to nation. Herodotus told of tribes who were as scanda- 
lized at the Greek custom of burying the dead as the Greeks were 
at them for eating their dead. If right and wrong were founded 
in nature, this would not be. The same rules would be in force 
everywhere. But depending on convention, they vary from 
place to place as it suits the dominant power to conceive them. 
And so vopuos, the law written and unwritten, is identified 


with convention, or institution depending on the arbitrary and 


changeable will of men, and is opposed to ¢vais, nature, as the 
temporary and variable to that which is permanent and rooted 
in the essential structure of things. 

The extent to which this sceptical doctrine had sunk into 
the practical life of Greece may be measured by any one who 
will contrast with the passage quoted above, the arguments 
ascribed by Thucydides to the Athenian delegates i in the famous 
Melian Dialogue. 


“As for the gods, we expect to have quite as much of their 
favour as you.... For of the gods we believe, and of men we 
know, that by a law of their nature wherever they can rule they 
will... . As to the Lacedemonians ... of all men whom we 
know they are the most notorious for identifying what is pleasant 
with what is honourable, and what is expedient with what is 
just,’’? etc’ 


4; Thus, the breakdown of the traditional Greek theory 
of the moral sanctions,.of the divine basis of virtue, and the 
authoritative supremacy of law, was not merely a matter 


1 Thuc., v. 105. Tr. Jowett. 


i PHILOSOPHIC ETHICS 551 


of speculative interest. It represented a change which had 
_ sunk deep into the minds of the people, and was a cause of 


anxiety to all thinking men. Accordingly, the efforts of the 
constructive thinkers of Greece during the latter part of the fifth 
century, and throughout the fourth, were devoted to the recon- 
struction of private morals and public law, to find arguments 
in admitted principles of thought or in the unimpeachable 
evidence of experience to replace the old supernatural basis of 
virtue, and to determine, in the phrase of the day, what was 
natural in state law as opposed to what was merely a matter of 


human agreement. In this effort the negative movement had 


already supplied a point of departure, for it had in essentials 
formulated a first principle of action; that every man aims at 
what is good for him, or at least at what appears good for him, 
was the/principle tacitly or openly avowed to which negative 
criticism had been brought. This principle was taken up by 
Socrates and his followers and made the starting-point of a 
moral reconstruction. No Greek thinker, whether constructive 
or negative, idealist or hedonist, Platonic or Aristotelian, called 
this axiom itself in question, but it was possible to show, as 
Socrates was the first to discover, that, however selfish in form, 
it was capable of an interpretation which would not only 
reconcile it with the highest claims of the moral consciousness, 
but even set these claims upon an apparently firm basis in 
reason. For though it may be true that all men aim at the 
apparent good, it does not follow that that good is the interest 
of self, or the satisfaction of the sensual nature as opposed to 
the fulfilment of a man’s function as a citizen and the cultiva- 
tion of his higher faculties. On the contrary, Socrates, whose 
philosophical method was that of conversation at the dinner- 
party or in the market-place, was easily able to appeal to the 


ordinary opinion of the average man, and to elicit from him 


that he held courage and justice, wisdom and temperance, the 


ordinary virtues of the good citizen, in higher esteem than the 


pleasures of the senses or the interest of money-getting. But 
if this were so, if it were in reality best for a man to restrain 
his lower nature and to practise the duties of a good father and 
a good citizen, if the higher good, however defined, lay in this 
direction, then the principle that each man.chooses what appears 
to him to be good will inevitably lead a wise man, who has found 
out where the true good lies, in the path of virtue and good 
citizenship; and if we find people who are cowards and unjust 
and unbridled in their licence, it is because they do not know 
where their true good lies, So the critics who held themselves 


552 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


superior to the ordinary moral tradition found their own weapon 


turned against them. Their principle that every one must aim 
at his own good is freely adopted, with the rider that he who 
knows his true good finds it essentially in adherence to those 
traditions which the sceptic scorns. The abandonment of virtue 
is a proof, not, as had been urged, of superior wisdom, but of 
ignorance of the real interests of human nature. Virtue, in 
fact, might be defined as a kind of art of measuring—the art of 
measuring values aright. He who knows what true pleasure is 
finds it in the pursuit of virtue; he who finds it elsewhere has 


‘made a mistake in his fundamental principles. 





5. But, after all, it was open to the critics to rejoin that the 
intrinsic value and goodness of the just and virtuous life was 
_assumed rather than proved. By what argument, it might be 
asked, or by what appeal to experience can it actually be made 
clear to a doubter beyond any possibility of a cavil that the man 
who is sacrificing some direct interest, some money-profit, or, 
perhaps, his personal security, for the sake of justice, is not mak- 
ing a gross miscalculation of values? In what sense is it urged 
that justice is in itself superior to injustice? Do we not admit 
that in refraining from injustice we are giving up something 
that is useful to ourselves and seeking the gain of another, and 
is this not incompatible with our first principle that every reason- 
able man seeks his own good? It is true that his losses might 
be made up to the just man by human rulers or by a divine 
judge, but what are we to say of the position of the just man 
under a tyrant or a tyrannous democracy, and what are we to 
think of the problem of divine judgment when the whole frame- 
work of the supernatural is being called in question? Besides, 
if the just man is acting for the sake of a reward—indirect and 
remote it may be, postponed to a future life it may be—is he 
really acting from a principle of justice? Is he not, after all, 
seeking a reward for himself though he calculates on a different 
basis from the unjust man, and if he miscalculates, need we 
admire or pity him? In a word, had any one the ring of Gyges 
would he not, once rendered invisible and so invulnerable to 
his fellow-men, do as Gyges did, and practise against them all 
manner of villainy that might be necessary in the course of 
satisfying his own desires? These positions are stated with 
extreme force and clearness in the second book of the Republic, 


1 This is the position attributed to Socrates in the Protagoras, and no 
doubt represents one side of the Master’s teaching, though the hedonism 
of the Dialogue probably represents one aspect only of the Socratic view. 


/ 


PHILOSOPHIC ETHICS 553 


and the demand is made upon the Socrates of the Dialogue to 
give an account of justice which will sweep all this network of 
doubts aside. Socrates is to show that the just man is happier 
and better off than the unjust, even if he escapes the notice of 
gods and men, even if he is misjudged in this world and the next, 
even if he sufiers the penalties of injustice and the unjust man 
gets the rewards of the innocent. The benefits of justice in 
itself are to prove such as to outweigh every possible considera- 
tion of external reward or penalty. Never before or since has 
the claim of the moral consciousness to override every other 
consideration been more uncompromisingly stated. The method 
by which Plato makes Socrates set out to answer the formidable 
difficulties propounded to him is that of inviting his hearers to 
a deeper analysis of the nature of the human being and of the 
state. He finds that human nature is in itself a commonwealth 
in miniature, in which there is a ruling portion represented by 
the reason. There is a spirited element whose natural function 
it is to assist the reason, as the military element of the state 
should assist the philosophical rulers. And, lastly, there is 
within man a many-headed monster of desire like the many- 
headed mob of the Athenian democracy. There are certain 
natural and proper relations which these different portions of 
the soul should maintain towards one another. The reason 
should rule, the spirited element should assist it in so doing, the 
many-headed monster should be under control ; and when these 
conditions are satisfied a certain harmony results; it is well 
with the man, his inner man is at peace. And in this peace 
and harmony the cardinal virtues which the ordinary Greek 
recognizes have their different parts to play. In the due exercise 
of the reason there is wisdom. In the aid rendered to wisdom 
by the due cultivation of the emotional element which enables 
us to withstand alike the temptations of danger and the se- 
ductions of pleasure, there is courage. For though the weak 
man may have implanted in him the right opinion as to how 
he should guide his action, something more than opinion is 
necessary when it comes to the pinch; there must be that 
tenacity which enables us to maintain our opinion in the face 
of temptation, and to show that tenacity is to be brave. Again, 
there must be an agreement among all the three parts, a harmony 
stretching through the whole of the soul, that reason should 
rule, and this harmony is temperance. Given these three 
virtues we have the conditions necessary for the healthy func- 
tioning of each part of the soul. This active functioning, which 
consists in a perfect co-operation of all parts of the soul, each 


Lae 


554 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


doing its own work without going outside, is Plato’s definition 
of justice. Justice, then, is, in the first place, the harmonious 
healthy life of the soul itself. But it is this inner harmony 
which enables a man to do his duty in the world to which he 
belongs. He plays the part required of him in the larger life 
of the state, because each element in his own nature plays the 
part required of it within the miniature commonwealth that 
forms his soul. The outer harmony depends on the inner. A 
man behaves as a good citizen because his moral nature is in 
healthy working order, and, conversely, when he fails in that 
duty his own nature is out of harmony with itself and is cor- 
rupted and diseased. ‘Thus, at the end of the argument, justice 
is above all things valuable to its possessor, in so far as the soul 
is more valuable to itself than all the rest of the world. Justice 
is to the soul what health is to the body—it is its active ex- 
cellence and perfect life; without it, nothing that seems good 
can be really good, with it there is no evil that cannot be faced. 
If pleasure be alleged as a more rational end for man, it may be 
retorted that it is only the pleasure of the soul which is a real 
pleasure. The pleasures of the many are transitory and full 
of contradiction. We see them on their holidays, then as now, 
filling the unreal part of themselves with unreal joys. The 
philosopher alone knows what reality is, and is proved, with a 
characteristic bit of Platonic humour, to have at least seven 
hundred and twenty-nine times as much real enjoyment as the 
devotee of the senses. 


6. Thus justice, which is here in men the. name-for-virtue, 
both the positions of the sceptic are met end turned, against-him,_ 
On the one hand, it is shown that if a man aims at what is good 
for himself;-he must; if he is a reasonable and instructed..being;~ 
endeavour to obtain At which is for his soul what» health.is for 
the body. On the other hand, if.it.is asked. on-whatlaws_ or 
conditions of nature is justice founded, the answer_is_t that ita 
is founded on the constitution. of human. nature. itself._¢ and of 
the societies which human beings form. These positions are in 
essence retained by Aristotle, though with more of that com- 
promising spirit which belongs to Aristotle’s method. The good 
is that at which everything aims, and is to be found in the per- 
formance of that function which nature assigns to it in the scheme 
of things. In this scheme the function of every class of being 
lies especially in the active realization of its own specific character. 
The specific character of man is that he is a rational animal, 


3 
By: 


PHILOSOPHIC ETHICS 555 


capable of governing himself by reason in a social life and capable 
of exercising his reason in the great department of speculation 
as a philosopher. In the first “direction his moral virtues are 
developed, in the second his speculative powers. And so the 
well-being of man consists in an active realization of the soul- 
life in accordance with what is excellent, and especially in 
accordance with the best and highest of excellences. This is the 
essence of well-being. But perhaps it would be extreme and 
paradoxical to maintain that external misfortune has no effect 
upon it. A man is not happy if the misfortunes of a Priam 
beset him. Yet even in such a case the nobility of his character 
will shine through. He will never be wretched as the caitiff 
and the sensualist might become; it will still be well for him in 
that he bears his misfortunes better than other people. But 
though fortune may help to make or mar, and though there is 
an element of chance in human life which is never wholly mastered 
and overcome by human reason, nevertheless, speaking generally 
—and Aristotle is clear that we can only speak generally and 
not universally in dealing with human affairs—the man who 
resolutely makes the best of his own powers and actively realizes 
them, is the happiest. He has no need of the ordinary pleasures 
as an appendage, so to say, to his life, for this realization of him- 
self at his best has its own pleasure within itself; as his life is the 
best, so is it also the pleasantest. Bad fortune will hinder him, 
good fortune will aid him in making the most of himself and in 
showing all that he hasitin him to be. But this is at the utmost 
a not indispensable advantage, and the essence of his well-being 
is that he himself does well. 


7. Thus, upon the fundamental question of moral philosophy 
Socrates, Plato, and . Aristotle were essentially at one. That 
question is by most modern moralists defined as the question 
of the nature of moral obligation. Why should I do what is 
right, or why should I recognize the distinction between right 
and wrong, ought and ought not? Is it a matter of some 
external reward or punishment befalling me according to the 
character of my conduct, or is it a matter of some intrinsic 
quality in the conduct itself? To the Greek philosophers the 
question took the form: What is the character of that which is 
really good for man, or in what does human well-being consist ? 
The answer which they gave to it was essentially that-it-consists 

the practice of virtue as being that_wherem human-nature 
finds its best, happiest and most “harmonious expression... This 
method of handling the-problemléads at once to the converse 


* 


556 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


question, Why do the majority of men at one time or another 

neglect virtue and do that which is evil? Nothing could be 
more characteristic of Greek modes of thought and of the gulf 
which separates them from Christian and post-Christian ethics 
than the method of handling this question. To the Christian 
theologian and to the moralist handling the subject with theo- 
logical conceptions behind him, the difficulty is to see how men 
come to do good. To the Greek thinker the paradox is rather 
that so many men do wrong. From the axiom from which all 
Greek thinkers started, it was clear that men could only do 
wrong from some mistake in their conception of what was good. 
If, as the three great thinkers whom we have mentioned were 
agreed, the good for men lay essentially in the pursuit of virtue, 
then in strict logic it could only be from some ignorance of its 
first principle that men went astray. Socrates, in fact, drew this 
deduction apparently without any hesitation or compromise. 
To him vice was ignorance, and if a man were found to be in- 
temperate, cowardly or unjust, it was only because he did not 
know what true temperance, courage and justice were, or how 
to apply the rules based upon them to the circumstances of his 
own life. He was a bad craftsman in the art of life, a man who 
did not know how to use his tools, and capable of being im- 
proved by instruction and by instruction alone. It was easy to 
see that the position so uncompromisingly stated led to para- 
doxical results. It tended to make all conduct a matter of the 
intellect and not of the character, and so in a sense to destroy 
moral responsibility. Accordingly in Plato we have an attempt 
at a reconstruction of the Socratic view. At any rate, in the 
maturer Dialogues we find, as has already been remarked, that 
the emotional or spirited element in man is called upon to take 
its share in the work of governing the wild beast that is within 
human nature. The force of character which enables a man to 
maintain his opinion is recognized as something distinct from 
the purely rational element in him which enables him origin- 
ally to gain his opinion. In the story of Leontios the son of 
Aglaion, the internal moral conflict, the division of the self into 
factions, and the wrath of the better part of human nature at 
the victory of the lower, are dramatically described. But for a 
complete theory of responsibility as far as Greek thought could 
take it, we must turn to Aristotle. Aristotle does not deny the 
major premiss from which the Socratic syllogism starts. Every 
intelligence, he admits, chooses what is best for itself, but in 
order that a right understanding of what is best may be attained, 
something more than intelligence is required. It is, after all, 


PHILOSOPHIC ETHICS 557 


only moral men who can thoroughly understand the nature of 
a moral code, for in moral matters intellectual enlightenment 
depends upon character. Hence those are mistaken who urge 
that we cannot be responsible for wrong-doing because the 
wrong-doer acts in accordance with what appears to him to be 
good and, if he is mistaken, cannot be held responsible for his 
ignorance. The reply to this is that ignorance proceeds from and 
is a mark of bad character, and it is his own slack method of 
living which has corrupted the bad man’s views and made him 
at once remiss in his conduct and mistaken in his judgment. 
Virtue does not come purely by nature, nor can it be taught in 
the schools like an art, but along with teaching, or rather ante- 
cedently to teaching itself, the youth must undergo a training in 
practice. This practical training will produce the necessary 
character. The character being formed will give us the right 
aims, and then a trained intelligence is necessary in the form 
of Practical Wisdom to reason from those aims and apply the 
results to practical affairs. This, in brief, is the psychology of 
the good man. Contrasted with him stands, in the first place, 
the profligate who has what Plato called “‘the lie in the soul,”’ 
who entertains, that is to say, the radically false principle of life 
that the proper thing for a man is always to pursue the pleasure 
ofthemoment. Thischaracteris again consistent. Bad training 
has given its possessor a bad principle, and he applies his principle 
resolutely in action. But between the good and the bad stands 
a third character whose essence is to be inconsistent. This is 
the incontinent man who has sufficient moral enlightenment to 
admit the goodness of virtue as a general principle, but who is so 
far overcome by passion and appetite as to find means of evading 
the application of the principle to the facts of conduct. He 
allows himself to be deluded by self-sophistication, and lets his 
desires represent the action which he is about in a light which 
prevents it from being seen to fall under the general rule which 
would forbid it. He does not deny that the courageous man is 
superior to the cowardly, but he is always sure that the present 
occasion is one which calls for discretion, and not for an imprudent 
display of valour. He does not uphold injustice, but while con- 
stantly overreaching his neighbour, is all the time convinced that 
he is only too modest in maintaining his own rights! But all 

1 These illustrations are not Aristotle’s, who confines himself to the case of 
the actual obliteration of rational reflection by sensual appetite. But the 
principle is the same. The great mass of wrong-doing, particularly in 
public affairs, seems to have a measure of self-sophistication as its necessary 


condition. Few people will admit nakedly, even to themselves, that what 
they dois wrong. They must have some specious terms in which to cloak 


558 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


this intellectual jugglery does not free him from responsibility. 
It is the consequence and the sign of an imperfectly disciplined 
character, and each man not only chooses his own actions, but, 
at least at the outset, he chooses his own character also, because 
the character is made by the actions. Human nature, upon 
this view, is neither intrinsically good nor intrinsically bad. It 
needs no supernatural grace to lift it out of the slough of original 
sin, neither is it born in a state of innocence from which it falls 
away as life proceeds. It has originally a natural capacity to 
be influenced by training and teaching, and if favourably situated 
where the winds blow upon it from healthy and salubrious climes, 
it flourishes and grows up into wisdom and moral goodness. If 
it fails to receive the right nutrition, and if no effort is made to 
respond to the training of the spiritual pastor and master, then 
it falls away, possibly into the deliberate corruption of the 
principle of selfish pleasure, perhaps rather into that twilight of 
the average sensual man in which the rule of right is something 
seen and acknowledged from afar, but never allowed to shine 
unshaded upon the agent’s own conduct. 


8. From the question why we should concern ourselves to be 
virtuous and how we should go about to be virtuous, we pass 
next to the question in what virtue consists. If by this is 
meant—What in the modern sense is the moral standard? it 
must be admitted that none of the thinkers we are here con- 
sidering have a perfectly definite answer to give. Even the 
famous Aristotelian Doctrine of the Mean is not a doctrine 
laying down an objective measure to which the rules of conduct 
and the laws of the state should conform. Nevertheless the 
Socratic thinkers have an ideal of their own which in many 
respects is very clearly defined. It is by no means identical with 
the ideal of the more spiritual religions; we may say that it is 
both more and less than they are. It is essentially an ideal for 
this world, and it bids men make the best of their life in this 
world. It is an ideal made for human nature. It is not one 
which consists in overcoming human nature. It is an ideal for 
‘the active citizens of a free state, not for men who can only 
hope to practise virtue by retiring from state affairs. Though 
they put the philosopher’s life above the statesman’s, neither 
Plato nor Aristotle could forget that they were members of a 
self-governing community, owing their freedom and their culture 





the deed. They must screen themselves from their own inner conscious- 
ness, and thus, though sophistication is not the originating cause, it is an 
essential condition of most conduct, public or private, that conflicts with 
admitted principle. 


PHILOSOPHIC ETHICS 559 


to the security which their citizenship gave them; nor could 
they leave out of their minds that a great part of the impulse 
which had turned men’s minds to moral philosophy was the 
endeavour to save the city state from that loosening of the 
bonds of political obligation which they saw going on around 
them. Hence the first duty of man, whether in the Republic or 
in the Ethics, is to be a good citizen. Whether, indeed, he can 
_always be a loyal citizen in a bad state, is a point which gives 
Aristotle some difficulty ; but that the ideal arrangement is that 
he should find a state of society in which to be a good man and 
a good citizen are one and the same thing is a matter about 
which there is no doubt. The good citizen is one who can both 
rule and be ruled. He has the self-discipline which enables him 
to submit to others when their turn comes, and the wisdom 
which enables him to direct, not only his own affairs, but those 
of the state when his own turn comes. He must be ready to 
fight for his city in war and to count it the noblest of deaths 
to die for her. He must be moderate in his pleasures, capable 
of restraining appetite lest it should get the mastery of him, 
not given to anger, but capable of righteous indignation when 
circumstances require it, liberal without ostentation in money 
matters, and careful of the rights of others to the point of being 
willing always to take less than his own share rather than press 
his interests too keenly. He should have an adequate measure 
of self-respect, and a great-souled man, who is in a sense the 
perfect type of this kind of character, being worthy of great 
things, should deem himself worthy of great things. He should 
know himself for what he is, and do nothing to belittle or demean 
himself. In voice, in gait and in gesture his dignity should be 
reflected. He should feel a proper pride in himself, and trust 
to that pride to keep him from anything degrading. He is thus 
the direct antithesis of the holy and humble man of heart whom 
the Christian teaching holds up to esteem. The antithesis is 
inevitable; the Christian saint is conscious of a sinfulness from 
which the divine grace alone has raised him, and which never- 
theless still tinges and stains all that he does when it is matched 
against the white radiance of infinite perfection. The great- 
souled Greek has learnt to govern his own nature; he measures 
himself with his equals, and if he owes a debt it is to his country 
and her laws, which he repays in the capacity of faithful and 
upright magistrate and citizen. And thus the Greek ideal is 
cast rather in the mould of the hero or the statesman than in 
that of the saint. Justice is far more prominent than benevol- 
ence; in place of the mortification of the flesh we have a reason- 


i): 


560 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


able temperance, a self-restraint which prevents the lower nature 
from usurping the place of the higher. We have the conception, | 
perhaps not less illuminating, that justice, being good, can only 
have good as its result, and therefore the punishment that is © 
just, far from doing harm to the criminal, is medicine that he 
should welcome for his own sake.” Finally, with the patriotism 
bound up with the city state we get the inevitable limitation 
which a purely civic morality entails. The rights and duties 
which the Greek citizen recognized were obligations existing in 
the full sense only as between a limited circle of freemen. Plato 
does not carry his humanitarianism beyond the point of urging 
that, in making war with one another, the Greek states should 
treat the conquered as they do now in the civil contests of 
factions within each state, and that, in making war upon the 
Barbarian, they should treat the conquered as they now treat 
conquered Greeks. Aristotle grades the rights of human beings 
according to the degree in which personality is developed. The 
man capable of full citizenship is the man fullycapable of directing 
affairs, and he is the possessor of practical wisdom in its complete- 
ness. The woman, the child and the slave who are not so quali- 
fied have inferior rights, and we have seen how Aristotle found in 
this a justification for the inequality of the sexes and for slavery. 
Yet the slave is, after all, a man, and, in so far as he is a man, 
he is capable of friendship and of entering into and fulfilling © 
obligations. Rights, as a modern might put it, depend on per- 
sonality. But personality—the capacity for free, responsible 
self-direction—is not the attribute of all human beings. 
Such, then, in brief, are the virtues and limitations of the 
civic ideal, but we must always remember that neither in Plato 
nor Aristotle is this the highest ideal of all. The idea of rising 
beyond human nature to something beyond it, the idea of becom- 
ing citizens of a better world than this, is to both the crown of 
their work; and we see in them the way paved, not only for the 
wise man of the Stoic philosophy who should reach perfection 


1 In some of the Platonic Dialogues this is pushed to the point of 
asceticism, and this line of the Platonic teaching is carried further by the 
old Academy and revived in Neoplatonism. But the maturer mind of 
Plato himself, as seen, for example, in the Republic, does not push asceticism _ 
beyond the limit of healthy self-restraint in the interests of the character 
as a whole. 

* That justice, being good, can never show itself in doing harm either to 
one’s enemy or to a bad man is the gist of the argument with Polemarchus 
in Republic, i. (see esp. p. 335). Soin the Laws (Book IX. 854) the object of 
punishment is never evil, but to make a man better, or at. any rate less bad. 
Similarly in the Ethics, only the incurable are to be altogether “ put 
beyond the boundaries.” 


PHILOSOPHIC ETHICS 561 


in a state of slavery or under a tyrannical rule, but even for the 
Christian saint who found his highest bliss in withdrawing from 
the affairs of this world altogether. The Platonic philosopher 
only remains a statesman from his sense of obligation to the city 
which has nourished and trained him. We shall not do him an 
injustice, says Plato, if we compel him to return into the cave 
where the prisoners of this world dwell, watching the play of 
unreal things in a dim and uncertain light; but in his heart he 
will always desire to range abroad freely in the Elysian Fields, 
where by the purer light of reason he can contemplate the essential 
goodness of things. Soin Aristotle’s scheme, for the philosopher 
the ultimate value of practical wisdom is to so regulate the 
affairs of life and bring the lower elements of the mind into order 
as to set the speculative wisdom free to rise to those higher 
objects of contemplation in which the Sage finds his true delight. 
The philosopher remains a man, partaker of a corruptible nature, 
and, therefore, incapable of sustaining a permanent conversation 
with high and heavenly things. Yet he must, as far as possible, 
put off his mortality and put on the likeness of the divine in- 
telligence, which is the centre of the universal order about which 
and towards which all things move. 

If we find this ideal lacking in some of the graces of those 
ethical systems which are associated with the spiritual religions, 
we must admit some counterbalancing merits of no less import- 
ance to Ethical growth. Instead of the rule of self-repression 
we have the ideal of expansion, of harmonious self-development, 
an ideal which may on occasion involve in it the necessity of 
extreme self-sacrifice, even to the point of dying for friend or for 
country, but which in more fortunate circumstances blossoms 
into the full flower of human excellence conceived as the realiza- 
tion of many-sided capacities, physical, moral, intellectual, and 
Spiritual. Secondly, we have the conception that this ideal is 
to be sought, in the first place, in patriotic devotion to the state 
regarded as a community of free citizens existing for the very 
purpose of glorifying common life and bringing forth from it the 
best it has in it to be, an association that comes into existence 
that men may live, but continues to exist that men may live well. 
Thirdly, the gifted man rises above, though never beyond, this 
civic ideal. He may never neglect the spiritual mother that has 
borne him, yet he has his own life apart, a life which is, in later 
phrase, hid with God, sharing with him the spiritual joy of con- 
templating nature and seeing that it is good, bathed “in that 
content surpassing thought the Sage in meditation found, and 
walked with inward glory crowned.” 

00 


562 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


9. While Plato and Aristotle may he said to have continued 
and developed the Socratic condition in its fulness, different 
sides of the Master’s teaching, taken by themselves, became the 
sources of separate schools. ‘The hedonistic tendency in Socrates 
was developed by Aristippus, and through him became the 
source of the Epicurean philosophy. The more ascetic tendency 
which sprung from the Socratic teaching of self-containment 
and the practical hardihood and moderation of his life, became 
the central feature in the teaching of Antisthenes. Here the 
doctrine that virtue is the essential condition of happiness is 
pushed to the point from which, as we have seen, Aristotle drew 
back. Man is made in a fuller sense the master of his fate. To 
live in accordance with virtue is laid down as the end of life, and 
it is the object of the wise. man to render himself independent 
of all external conditions over which he himself cannot exercise 
control. Aristotle, in defining self-sufficiency, laid down that 
we cannot apply the term to any man considered by himself, 
but only by taking into account his family, his friends, and, 
indeed, his city, since man is by nature a political animal. To 
the Cynic, virtue alone was self-sufficient for happiness, needing | 
nothing further, unless it were a Socratic fortitude. He had 
overcome desire. He would enter into no hampering bond with 
other human beings. In particular, the city was one of the en- 
cumbrances from which the true philosopher was free. For a — 
home, his tub sufficed for Diogenes, and if asked of what state 
he was a citizen, he replied that he was a citizen of the world— 
a cosmopolitan. Thus, a full-blown doctrine of self-reliance 
makes also for universalism. The particular and special ties by 
which men are grouped together fall away, and with the abstract 
assertion of the human personality as the supreme object of life 
and as ruler of its own destiny, there arises also the conception 
of universal humanity as the only community to which the 
individual owes an allegiance. The doctrines of self-mastery 
and world-citizenship thus originating with the Cynics, were 
developed into the most influential system of antiquity by the 
founders of Stoicism. ‘The wise man of the Stoics was to live, 
in accordance with the first formula of the school, consistently. 
In accordance with the second and better-known formula he was 
to live consistently with Nature. But what was Nature? It 
was the universal order and harmony of things where everything 
by a divine overruling providence had its place, where everything 
which fulfilled its nature served the whole, where the healthy 
life of every part was a contribution to the life of the whole 
organism. The wise man learnt, in the first place, to contain 


PHILOSOPHIC ETHICS 563 


himself and to bow to the universal order of things; to will, as 
Epictetus said, that each thing should take place as it does take 
place—that is, “as the disposer of things has disposed them ; and 
he has ordained that there should be summer and winter, plenty 
and scarcity, virtue and vice, and all these contraries for the sake 
of the harmony of the whole.’ In this universal scheme of 
Nature man must play his part in accordance with the natural 
capacity assigned to him. He is the child of God in a special 
sense, and he should realize, therefore, that he has no lowly or 
ignoble birth, and realizing that, he will have no lowly or ignoble 
thoughts about himself. A god is given to each man, a deity 
(in the shape of his own reason), to guard over him; one that 
is sleepless and incapable of being deceived, who, if you shut the 
doors and make it all dark, is still there with you, and with him, 
God Himself. ‘ For you are not alone, but God is with you and 
your deity.” God, in disposing things, has put certain things 
within our power, or rather within the power of this controlling 
deity within us—our reason. Our part in life consists in ruling 
those things well, and in realizing that other things are such 
as we cannot rule. And since God is good he has put within 
our power all things essential to our own happiness to possess. 
It follows that external things which we cannot control are 
indifferent to us, and all that matters to us is to preserve our 
own souls untouched. Externals are merely the material, in 
the use of which our own character manifests itself. “‘ Good 
things are the virtues and what appertains to the virtues; evil 
are the opposite to these; indifferent are wealth, health, and 
reputation.”’ He whom these things can disturb is not a wise 
or virtuous man, but if you ask who is the invincible, he is the 
man who has put the world beneath his feet, whom none of those 
things which are independent of his will can move from his 
course. 

This self-centred conception of the wise man can at times be 
pushed to the point of harshness and coldness. For instance, 
in discussing suicide, Epictetus bids the philosopher remain in 
the bodily prison as long as reason tells him, just as Plato had 
already said, that he is placed there as a sentinel and must not 
desert his post. God has need of the world and its inhabitants, 
but if He sounds the signal as he did to Socrates, then the 
philosopher should obey the signaller as his general. But in 
the performance of duty, the feelings of his relations, even of 
his mother, are not to be taken into account. It is not your 
action that will grieve them, but just that which grieves you— 
namely, their own opinion. “‘Do you take away your own 


564 © MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


opinion, and if they do well they will take away theirs, and 
otherwise it will be on their own responsibility that they will 
lament.’”? But Stoicism has a softer and more social side. 
Since God is the father of all, it follows that all men are brothers ; 
the slave differs from the emperor only by accident of external 
position. If Epictetus is asked how one is to refrain from anger 
with a neglectful slave, he will answer, “* Slave yourself, will you 
not bear with your own brother; he has Zeus as his forefather, 
is a son of the same loins as yourself and the same descent. .. . 
Do you not remember who you are and what men you are ruling, 
that they are kinsmen and brothers by nature, that they are 
descendants of Zeus?’’ Do you answer—lI bought them? If 
so, you are looking “into the abyss, into the wretched laws of 
the dead and not to those of the gods.’”’ Thus the brotherhood 
of the Stoic transcends the gulf betwixt bond and free; equally 
it obliterates the distinction between the fellow-citizen and - 
stranger,! and the great and supreme community is the society 
of man and gods from whom all things come. ‘“‘ The poet says, 
‘ Dear city of Cecrops,’ will you not say, dear city of Zeus ? ”’ 
Though hard with himself, the Stoic could not be hard with 
the offender, for vice, says the mild emperor following Socrates, 
is ignorance of the good, and I who have seen good could not 
be angry with the bad man whois my kin. Moreover, if your— 
father does wrong, says Epictetus, he suffers already in character. 
Do not then wish him to lose anything else on that account. 
Even the false judge can do you no harm. The real evil of 
punishment falls always upon the offender, and what have you 
to do with the evil which belongs to another; if the judge’s 
decision is unjust, that is his loss. Men are indifferent to the 
Stoic, however, only in the sense that their doings cannot affect 
his will, nor therefore what is essentially good or evil to him. 
But, says Marcus Aurelius, in so far as I ought to benefit and 
bear with them, they are the nearest of things to me. Virtue, 
though springing from the individual and resting on his personal 
wisdom and self-control, is eminently social in its manifestations. 
“Rejoice in one thing alone and rest in it, in passing from 
one social action to another social action with mindfulness of 
God.” If the expressions of Stoicism are often hard and lend 
themselves at times to a certain appearance of heartlessness and 
1 Similarly in social intercourse, Epictetus, who represents the more 
rugged side of Stoicism, bids us prefer goodness to every other consideration. 
“I have nothing in common with my father but with the good man.” 
“Are you so hard?” ‘‘ Yes, for so I was made. ... For this reason, 


if the good is anything different from the noble and the just, father and 
brother and country and all things are gone ”’ (Epict., iii. 3. 5). 


PHILOSOPHIC ETHICS 565 


isolation, in the gentler handling of a spirit like that of Marcus 
the social side becomes the dominant feature, and we learn that 
if a man is to ask nothing for himself, yet he is gratefully to 
acknowledge every good gift that he receives from all around 
him, and to be willing to give his all to others.t 


10. But it was not so much the gentler social virtues as the 
fundamental obligations which bind man to his fellows that 
interested the Stoics. Deep as was the mark left on the world 
by their self-containment, it was not the greatest or most lasting 
effect of their teaching. It was at the point where moral philo- 
sophy touches the theory of law and government that their 
influence was widest and most abiding. For it is to them more 
than to any other school of thought that the world owes the 
conception of an ethical ideal standing above the wills of legis- 
lators, whether despotic or popular, as a standard to which they 
ought to conform. This ideal took shape in the conception of 
a Law of Nature which stood above all human conventions and 
held up a standard to which state law ought to conform. The 
conception of Nature was not introduced into Ethics by the 
Stoics. We have seen that at the outset the fundamental 
problem of conduct was raised in the form of the question, 
*‘ Are justice and the other virtues natural or merely conven- 
tional? Are they founded on nature or the products of human 
agreement, which may be relegated at will to the lumber-room 
of disused ideas ?’’ We have seen how Plato undertook to prove 
that they were founded on nature, and did so by showing that 
they rest on the constitution of man and of human society. So 
far “nature ’’ appears as the basis of morals. In Aristotle it 
_ begins to serve as a standard of custom. At least in regard to 
justice, Aristotle recognized that there must be some more ideal 
and scientific standard than that embodied in the written and 
unwritten law and custom of the Greek states. Rules of justice 
as embodied in law were changeable and varied from place to 
place, while that which is natural is the same everywhere. But 
though natural laws change, says Aristotle, there must be one 
state, one constitution, which is everywhere natural—namely, 
that which is the best : and there must be one set of laws every- 
where natural—namely, those which the best state would adopt. 
But the law of nature, after all,is an incident in Aristotle’s treat- 
ment of justice; with the Stoics it becomes the central principle. 


1 In the above references to Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius I have 
freely used Mr. Long’s translations, without, however, always adhering to 
his words. . 


566 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


It appeared to supply, and in its degree it did supply, that 
systematic conception of a moral standard in which they found 


earlier theories lacking. For if the older thinkers had taught . 


that man’s true happiness lies in the practice of virtue, they had 
given little attention to the question why certain classes of action 
are considered virtuous. They took over in the main the current 
ideas which they found as to the particular virtues, idealizing and 
sometimes supplementing and correcting them, no doubt, but 
not upon the whole seeking for any first principle by which the 
value of these traditional rules might be tested. Now such a 
principle the Stoics conceived that they had found in the law 
prescribed by Nature itself to man. This could be discovered— 
such, at least, seems to be the implied process of thought—by 
considering how far the rules of conduct which we actually recog- 
nize are due to human institutions, and what would remain if 
we conceive them done away with. Proceeding on this line of 
thought, for instance, it is easily recognized that such an institu- 
tion as slavery is not “natural.’’ It is an institution of men, for 
without such institution who would enslave himself? So again 
with all other inequality of rights. By law one man may be 
given privileges over another, but take away the law and what 


privilege could remain? On the other hand, if we consider such. 


a matter as the fulfilment of obligations, the obligation itself, 
we may say, is the result of a compact made by men, yet we 
feel in ourselves a “‘ natural ’’ impulse to fulfil it, even without 
legal compulsion, and so to keep our contracts is a part of 
“natural ’’ law. Reasoning on such lines as these, from their 
conception of Nature as one Kosmos, animated by One God, the 
father of all mankind, the Stoics arrived at the idea of a Law 
of Nature prescribing the freedom, equality and brotherhood of 
mankind, overriding alli distinctions of class, and race, and 
nation, prescribing good faith and mutual obligation, even when 
there was no law. This was no empty theory, but an active 
principle, influencing the practical legislation of the great Roman 
lawyers.t The freedom, equality and brotherhood of man, the 
inherent injustice involved in distinctions of class and of nation- 
ality, the original sanctity of contracts, and, as a consequence, 
the recognition of moral obligations to those to whom one is 
bound by no law—such ideas as these originate with the con- 
ception of a law which Nature lays down for man, and is, there- 
fore, independent of convention and superior to the enactments 
of kings. We have already seen the influence which this con- 


1 See quotations from the stoically trained jurisconsults in Lecky, 
History of Huropean Morals, i. 295, 296. 


————_ 


PHILOSOPHIC ETHICS 567 


ception had in mitigating the hardships of Roman slavery. 
We trace it in the successive extensions of the franchise, which 
broke down the barriers between conquering Rome and the 
subject provincials. We may trace it once more in the humane 
laws which broke up the barbaric supremacy of the paterfamilias, 
Indeed, “‘there were few departments into which the catholic 
and humane principles of Stoicism were not in some degree 
carried.” In the mind of the best of the emperors, Stoical 
principle kept alive the ideal of a “constitution of equal laws 
ordered in accordance with equality and equal freedom of 
speech, and a kingship honouring above all things the freedom 
of those who are ruled.” Such an ideal was unattainable in 
the second century after Christ, but that it should have been 
placed on record by the absolute master of the Roman world as 
his conception of the principle by which he would govern him- 
self, is not the least remarkable testimony to the strength of 
the Stoical creed. The law of Nature was not, as we shall see 
more fully, in the end an adequate formula for the moral standard, 
but it was a stepin that direction. It was an assertion that such 
a principle could be found, and it recognized that actual codes 
deviate from the principle in consequence of what is arbitrary 
and. accidental in the laws of their growth. 

Greek ethics thus bequeathed two great contributions to the 
solution of the ethical problem. In its earlier stage it founded 
moral obligation on the well-being of the individual. It taught 
that virtue was not an emptying but a fulfilment of the person- 
ality. It reconciled individual seif-development with legal, 
law-abiding citizenship in a free city state. In its later stages, 
when the old civic life was breaking up and the problem taking 
new shape, it laid the foundations of a universalist ethics by 
conceiving an ideal standard of conduct applicable to all man- 
kind, not subordinate but superior to state law, an ideal to which 
social as well as individual custom should be made to conform. 
In neither of these directions, however, was its analysis final. 
- How it was pushed further by modern thought we have now to 
inquire. 


CHAPTER VII 
MODERN ETHICS 


1. THE tradition of Greek ethics did not wholly disappear 
with the decay of the classical civilization. In part it was 
incorporated in Roman law, and if buried with it for a time, 
shared in its revival from the twelfth century onwards. In 
part it coalesced with the leading ideas of Christianity, and 
was made subservient to the exposition of Christian doctrine. 
Particularly, as we shall see more fully later, the idea of a Law 
of Nature has a continuous history from the “common reason ”’ 
of Heraclitus and the “‘natural justice’’ of Aristotle, through 
the Roman jurisprudence and the Canon Law to Grotius and 
Hobbes, and from them to Locke and Rousseau. Modern 
Moral Philosophy starts with the wisdom of the Greeks as its 
working capital. But from the first it had to deal with a more 
complex situation, a more tangled conflict of claims upon the 
conscience, a wider apparent fissure between the individual life 
and the social order. 

The rise of a world religion, with claims on the spiritual life 
which were by no means easy to reconcile with any political 
authority, resulted in medieval Europe in a separation of the 
Spiritual and Temporal powers and the erection of distinct 
and frequently opposed authorities, each claiming the strict 
allegiance of the individual. The Reformation threw these two 
powers in many countries into prolonged and violent antagonism, 
and the problem of conflicting duties to king and country on 
the one hand, and to Christ and the Church, or to God and 
conscience, on the other, was raised in its most acute form. 
Such a conflict could leave neither political nor spiritual authority 
unimpaired, and where the Greek philosophers had something 
to appeal to which all men were in a measure ready to recognize 
in the state and the traditional laws and customs which the 
state maintained, the first problem of modern philosophy was 
to find a higher authority to which either State or Church might 
appeal. There could no longer in thinking minds be any question 
of accepting either of the rivals as ultimate and supreme arbiter 
of right and wrong. Thus deprived of an unquestioned external 

568 


MODERN ETHICS 569 


authority, men were thrown back, in the first instance, on their 
interpretation of the revealed Word of God, but as the principal 
conflict had turned from the first on questions of interpretation, 
and as experience had shown how the plainest meaning could be 
wrested into an ambiguous sense or the most categorical mandate 
erected on the basis of a forced interpretation, it was plain that 
revelation alone couldsupply no single and unquestioned standard 
whereby doubts might be removed. Hence the logic of facts 
drove men to the admission of private judgment, and the decay 
of a universally recognized authority forced the thinker to fall 
back on the individual, and to find in his conscience, his instincts, 
his reason, possibly in his merely selfish necessities, but at any 
rate somewhere in his “nature ”’ as a human being, a point of 
departure for theories of moral conduct and the social order. 
This was in a sense to repeat what the Greek thinkers had 
done when they found a basis of political order and social justice 
in the moral nature common to all human beings. But the 
whole historical situation made it impossible for modern thought 
to offer so simple a solution as that which had satisfied the 
Greeks. The conflict between law and conscience, public 
authority and private judgment, had been raised in too acute a 
form. The Greeks might be satisfied with the proof that, man 
being a social animal, his duties as a citizen were a necessary 
part of the life that was best for himself, and so conclude to a 
close identification of private and public welfare. But to the 
modern it was not merely self-interest, but conscience which 
often clashed with authority. While to the Greek there was 
one form of political association which was obviously best, to the 
modern, particularly at the period of the rise of modern ethics 
in the seventeenth century, it might be said with more truth 
that there was no form of political association open at all, but 
only submission to some form of political despotism. The cor- 
porate life of the Middle Ages was everywhere in an advanced 
stage of decay. Political virtue meant for the many, not “the 
capacity to rule and be ruled with a view to the best life,”’ but 
submission to the powers that were. The process of erecting a 
true commonwealth under modern conditions had not passed 
the experimental stage, nor had the experiments been wholly 
encouraging. It would have been to assume too much to lay 
down that public and private well-being were two sides of the 
same thing. It had to be recognized that the individual might 
have a life of his own, and that both from interest and from 
| conscience he might have motives bringing him into conflict’ 
_ with the interests of state as interpreted by the ruler. 


570 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


Thus the antithesis of the individual and society was more — 
deeply cut than in the Greek days. The claims made by the 
moral law were more exacting, and in some measure consisted | 
in ideals to which the mass of men have never been brought to 
render much more than lip service. It was one thing to agree 
that true well-being for the individual lay in the exercise of 
qualities which all really admired, and outside the discussions 
of the sceptic’s lecture-room treated in practice as the essential 
equipment of a gentleman. It was quite another thing to proffer 
the same justification for duties which few in their hearts re- 
garded as more than formulas which might mean something to 
an anchorite, but had little living relation to the affairs of ordinary 
life. Not only is the modern moral code harder, but modern 
life is more complex and its ramifications more widespread. 
Political duty, to instance a single point, may impose on the 
citizen of a great kingdom, and still more on one of a world 
empire, consideration for those whom he never has seen or will 
see, and the kind of political virtue so called upon is far more 
difficult to evolve and sustain in active being than the public 
spirit of a compact community where every one knows his neigh- 
bours, and the consequence of a public wrong falls at once and 
manifestly, if not on the very men who have voted for it, then on 
neighbours whose sufferings they actually witness. Thus it is 
owing partly to an advance in thought, partly to a change in the 
ethical situation, that in modern philosophy the Greek antithesis 
between the real and the apparent good, the choice respectively 
of reason and desire, deepens into the opposition of duty and 
interest, and morality presents itself, not so much as a source of 
happiness which every enlightened man must eagerly choose for 
himself, but rather as a law imposed on human nature to the 
cheerful performance of which it may by an effort attain, but 
which compels by authority, rather than appeals by inherent 
attractiveness. Duty and self-sacrifice become central concep- 
tions of ethical theory. At the same time, since conduct cannot 
have moral worth unless it is unconstrained, the sanction of 
this law had to be found within human nature itself, and even 
in a sense within the nature of each individual, who must at least 
adopt of his own choice the law by which he is compelled uni- 
formly to consider other interests than his own and may be con- 
strained to sacrifice all that is dear to him. Thus the modern 
world has the ancient paradox before it in a yet sharper form. 
For though it may be said-that true well-being lies for us, as for 
the ancients, in well-doing, and though this solution is occasion- 
ally brought up afresh, yet it fails to the modern mind to be more 


MODERN ETHICS 57] 


than a re-statement of the problem to be solved, since that well- 
being which was an undivided conception for the Greeks has 
been analyzed for us into the Happiness which a man experi- 
ences within his own consciousness, and the excellence which 
another may praise and admire in him, but which may have 
brought him a heavy balance of sorrow. For similar reasons 
the Greek axiom that every man seeks the good, though useful 
in its place, can hardly avail to solve an antithesis which derives 
its whole point from the frequent conflict of moral goodness 
with the good things for which our nature craves. 


2. Thus modern systems have moved between the poles of an 
authoritative moral law and an unconstrained self-direction of 
human nature, and the attempt to suppress either term of the 
antithesis brings about its Nemesis in the movement of thought. 
The ball is set rolling by Hobbes, in whose system the element 
of law, identified here with state law, becomes merely derivative. 
By the “‘law of nature,” as we find it at this stage, each man 
seeks his own preservation, but since in the correlative “‘ state of 
nature,’ where every man’s hand is against every man. the life 
of all is or would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,”’ 
men agree together tacitly or expressly to confer the plenitude 
of their natural rights upon a king who shall rule over them 
and keep them from mutual wrongs. This is the social contract 
which men make and maintain, each for the sake of his own 
preservation, since its persistent breach would reduce society 
to primeval chaos. Thus, in the name of the Law of Nature, 
Hobbes reduced morality to egoism as its ultimate basis. But 
in so doing he provoked the retort that his account of our nature 
does not correspond with the facts, and a succession of writers 
lay stress on the several social elements in human nature, while 
Butler, the form of whose theory is still determined by the 
questions set by Hobbes, elaborates a complete theory of the 
natural constitution of man in which conscience is, by the very 
law of the constitution and with the approval of self-love itself, 
established as the authoritative guide. Yet Butler in the end 
fails doubly, not only because he has no provision for the actual 
variations in the deliverance of conscience, but also because, 
with a backwash of feeling from the currents of the time, he end 
by admitting self-love to a supremacy which would be fatal to 
his whole argument if he had not future rewards and punish- 
ments to fall back on. But to fall back on the supernatural | 
was, in effect, to abandon the position and leave the way open 
for other lines of thought. 


en 


572 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


The most vigorous of these, in England, was the attempt to 


conciliate the egoistic and social sentiments on the lines of what 


was later known as Utilitarianism. Partly through the analysis. 


of moral judgments (as in” Hume’s. Enquiry), partly by the 
analysis of desire, (as in Hartley and the Mills), the position was 
\reached that the good is universally the pleasurablé. But on 
this at once arose the fundamental question, Whose good and 
whose pleasure are to be considered? Mine by me and yours 
by you, or that of all men by both of us? In this statement of 
the question the antithesis of duty and interest was resolved 
into that between others and self, and assumed a particularly 
acute form. For the psychological proof that pleasure is the 
object of desire pointed to egoism. It was my pleasure which 
my desire was supposed to contemplate. But the thesis that 
the pleasurable is the good, once granted, was applied to society 
as a whole. The happiness of all men was laid down as the 
standard of action, and its promotion urged (as by the younger 
Mill) as a duty. The reconciliation between these somewhat 
contradictory positions was sought in the sympathy and social 
feelings of mankind whether natural (Adam Smith) or built up 
on a more egoistic basis by a process of association (Hartley and 
James Mill). Through these feelings a man might come to 
identify his pleasure and pain with those of others, and de- 
liberately sacrifice all purely personal happiness for the pleasure 
of serving his fellow-men, or to avoid the pain of remorse con- 
sequent on a betrayal. /Taken at its best, however, this explana- 
tion gives no adequate account of rational obligation. It may 
be said to show that self-sacrifice is possible, and to offer an 
account of how the feeling of duty arises in the individual ; but 
it does not make clear in what precise sense we can tell the man 
whose sympathies are not sufficiently developed to make him 


___ prefer another’s happiness to his own, that he “ought” to do 


so, that this is his “duty,” to perform which is ‘right ” and 
to neglect it “‘wrong.’’ Do these terms simply mean that this 
is the course of conduct which we prefer and which, if he felt 
as we do, he would also prefer, or do they mean that the more 
social conduct is intrinsically preferable whether he or we happen 
to prefer it or not ? © 

If with the last of the great Utilitarians we adopt the latter 
view, we impinge upon the line of thought which in the form 
at one time of Intuitionism, in another of Rationalism, has run 
its course throughout modern philosophy from the Cambridge 
Platonists to our own day. We need not here refer to earlier 
phases of this form of thought, for rationalism took upon itself 


MODERN ETHICS 573 


a new being in the Kantian theory., To the conception of 
“morality as a law Kant gave the strongest expression that it 


has ever received. For him the very assertion of a moral judg- 


ment implies the existence of a law binding on all men as such, 
irrespective of persons and of tonsequences, and duty is s duty. 
only when done for the fulfilment: of this law and for no ex- 
taneous motive. But again, since in morality man must be 
free, it is only man_himself who can impose this law upon him- _ 
self. He is at once sovereign and subject, sovereign as a rational 
being, a member of the spiritual world, which underlies pheno- 
mena; subject as a phenomenon existing in time and space, 
conditioned by those categories of substance and causation by 
which alone a phenomenon can exist. As rational he prescribes 
to himself a law which, as a being in the world of sense, he may 
obey or disobey. If he were pure reason, he would conform to 
law without effort and be perfect. If he were pure sense, he 
could know no law. Partaking of both natures, he is a respon- 
sible being, the subject, but not always the obedient subject, 
of a moral law. \ 
In defining morality as law and in making it a law set by ‘\ 
man to himself, Kant is in the centre of modern ethical thought. 
But the peculiar setting of his doctrine was in part determined 
by the transitional character of the Kantian metaphysics, and 
in part by certain exaggerations natural at the outset in the 
statement of all that a law implies. Kant’s critics have pointed 
out, for example, that a rational law cannot disregard circum- 
stances or consequences, as Kant would have it do. On the 
contrary, if the practical reason in man meant anything, it 
meant a capacity to be guided by ends and to direct action 
thereto, and ends could not be served without taking changes of 
circumstance and all manner of consequences into account. 
Hence, if there was to be a rational law binding on all human 
beings as such without regard to any extraneous considerations, 
it must be a law binding them to permanent regard for some 
universal end. Again, those who stand nearest to the direct 
line of descent from Kant in modern Ethics admit that Reason 
was misconceived when it was placed in fundamental opposition 
to every emotional impulse. Reason, on its practical as on its 
theoretic side, is that which makes for coherence, connectedness, 
harmony. It forms experience into a connected whole, and it 
condemns as irrational only that idea which will not fit into the 
whole. On the ethical side it is that which makes for unity and 
coherence among the different and often jarring elements of our 
nature, and it is to be understood accordingly, not as an authority 


574 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


above and outside all feelings, emotions, sentiments and what- 
ever else may impel us to action, but as a principle working 
within them towards harmony. If under the name of feeling 
we include all the interest we take in action and the ends and 
outcome of action, then reason undoubtedly rests on a basis of 
feeling ; but while as irrational beings we feel things imperfectly, 
confusedly and inconsistently, so as to be led hither and thither 
by the stress of impulse, the work of reason is to gather up all 
feelings into one steady movement of will-power, to give them 
unity or at least consistency of direction, and so achieve for us 
a life that is at one with itself. Such an order is a rational 
order, because its component parts, instead of conflicting, 
support and further one another. . 

If the work of reason could be so completed that every impulse 
within us fitted in of itself as part of such an order, we should 
have what. Kant called the perfect will and the sense of duty 
would cease. But because the work of reason is never complete 
our nature is never wholly at one with itself, there is strife 
within us. In part our impulses are harmonized and set in one 
definite direction, and it is here that we feel that our true self 
lies. In part they still rebel and chafe against their limits, and 
then arises the feeling of constraint and of moral obligation. 
Thus our nature in a sense lays a law upon itself, and this law 
is a rational law, and yet its foundation is in feeling and its 
purpose is the satisfaction of the permanent bent of our nature. 
These and similar criticisms urged by the Idealist thinkers who 
claim descent from Kant fall into line with the metaphysical 
criticisms by which they sought to overcome the dualism of the 
Critical philosophy and to depict the entire process of things as 
a working out or realization of Spirit. In this way of thinking 
the familiar ethical antitheses tend to be regarded as apparent 
rather than real. The opposition between duty and interest or 
reason and desire is resolved into that between the real and 
permanent self and the illusory or temporary impulse. The 
very distinction between self and others disappears in the con- 
ception of a Universal Self which is the underlying reality of 
each, and whose movement towards realization constitutes the 


ee 
con 


always in the track of this movement of thought is the idea of 
Personality. Idealism sets out to overcome the separateness 


“Of individuals, but often seems to be only too successful, and 


to destroy what it ought to explain. Philosophy, then, has still 
to find a satisfactory method of stating the theory of moral 


MODERN ETHICS 575 


obligation in terms which do full justice at once to individual 
personality and to the spiritual unity which binds men to the 
service of the common good. / I-will endeavour to state as briefly 
as possible the conclusion to which, in my own view, the course 
of thought, as shown in the considerations here just touched 
upon, seems to point. 


3. As to the general conditions of the problem, any theory 
which recognizes an obligation in ethics must admit that there 
are actrons which, if a man does not perform them with his 
whole heart, he yet feels constrained to perform. So far we 
have obligation as a psychological fact, explain it how we may. 
But further, a rationalist theory of ethics maintains that this 
constraint, to be of a “moral” nature, must be quite distinct 
from any pressure of external sanction, 7. ¢. it must proceed from 
human nature, and so, as Kant showed, be imposed by each man 
upon himself. But none the less, thirdly, if it is to be some- 
thing more than a psychological fact—a mere expression for the 
ultimate preference for one course of conduct over another—it 
must also be “ objective,” 7. e. it must hold good for you and for 
me whether you or I ultimately acquiesce in it or not. It is 
the prima facie opposition of these two last points which con- 


obligation. /The moral law which I recognize must be some- 
thing which I adopt as a law binding on myself, and in that 
sense subjective. Yet it must be a law which binds me, even 
though I do not adopt it, and in that sense objective. 


stitutes nw tt m0 paradox and the real difficulty of moral 


The Greeks ferrunlated this problem in the shape of the--~— 


contrast between my own good and that of others (the adddrprov 
dyafov), and solved it (Ethics, ix. 8) by the thesis that my real 
good was the good of my real self, that this was the reason that 
is in me, and that reason might tell me to sacrifice the apparent 


good which lay in the satisfaction of my lower desires and satisfy | 


my real self by serving others. In sum, in morals as in all 
conduct I seek my own good, but as a moral man I judge truly 
that my good is to secure the good of others. The Kantian 
olution starts from a similar antithesis of reason and desire, but 
ests on a profounder analysis of the moral judgment and of 
e whole distinction between the objective and the subjective. 











opt as my own, which proceeds therefore from my own nature. | 
is objective in that it expresses a rational order which [ 
apprehend as a rational being, and which I disobey only wher 


and in so far as I am also an irrational neicly /The principle” onion 


o Kant, morality is subjective in that it is a law which I fteelypon"""") 


125 B, 
raceme 


“— 


— 


576 ) MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


underlying the solution is the peculiarly Kantian thesis that the 
objective is the rational, and, if this principle be admitted, the 
antithesis between subjective and objective ceases to be an. 
antithesis between something that proceeds from within and 
something that proceeds from without. The contrast which the 
terms henceforward express, lies between that which rests on 
the caprice, the inclination, the erroneous or partial judgment 
of the individual, and that which must commend itself to all 
men in so far as they are guided by the rational element within 


__them. 


The problem, then, being re-stated, the question whether 
morality can be regarded as a matter of obligation resolves 


_ itself into the question of finding rati nds for the moral 


judgment. Now if we seek for such ground outside the moral 
order we are at once convicted of the attempt to find a non- 
moral justification for morality. The rationalist, then, who 
stands by a moral obligation must seek it in the content or char- 
acter of the moral order itself. He must ask himself whether 
the moral order is a rational order, and he must determine the 
question by applying the same tests of rationality which he 
would use in any other intellectual problem. It is, indeed, ob- 
jected to this test that the moral judgment does not, like the 
judgment which relates to the physical order, state a matter of 
fact, but rather imposes a command. We might accept the 
objection without fundamentally altering the test to be used. 
For orders issued may be intelligible or unintelligible, con- 
sistent or inconsistent. We can compare them one with another 
and see how they stand when regarded as a totality, and, as 
we shall clearly see when the tests of rationality are passed in 
review, we can apply these tests to them as readily as to any 
other body of thought. But further, the rationalist will not 
wholly admit that the moral judgment merely issues an order 
and does not state a truth. On the contrary, it either asserts 
or implies that one course is “right,” or “ good,” or “ better ” 
than another, and in so doing it appears to be founded on real 
relations of things, and as such subject to the test applicable to 


~~all judgments which claim to be valid and to deal with reality. 


‘Now the validity of any judgment can only be tested or 
easured by another judgment independently formed but 


ibearing on the same point. If the first judgment is corrobo- 
‘rated by the second, we, so far, consider it valid. Now the 
‘second, judgment in turn -may demand corroboration. No final 


test of validity can be attained until we have exhausted all 
the points of view from which a given order of reality can be 


MODERN ETHICS 577 


approached. “At this point the system of connected judgments 
so formed is valid, not in view of any further judgment founded 
on some outside source, for ex hypothest no such outside judg- 
ment remains to be formed, but in virtue of its internal coher- 
ence. /Thus the validity of a single judgment depends on its 
place’within a system of judgments, the validity of the system 
on its internal coherence, the fact that it is built up of judg- 
ments which not only do not conflict, but maintain and necessi- 
tate one another. Final truth in such a system could only be 
claimed with perfect assurance if we knew that we had exhausted 
all the points of viewing the order of reality with which we are 
dealing, and this is why final truth is not attainable by man. 
But the most complete truth which man can reach lies in the 
most comprehensive system of coherent thought which he can 
construct, and the way of reason lies always in the effort towards 
such a system, and of unreason in the adoption of beliefs which 
conflict with one another and cannot be reduced to a LiCmaMT REE 
order. 
Reason, then, generically is the impulse towards a holereet 
_ whole, and it takes any partial judgment as an element which 
must be assimilated by the whole before its final truth can be 
established. 
Now what is Reason on its practical side? When we deem 
a thing good or bad we are making a judgment and even assert- 
ing a fact. But that fact at bottom is a preference. 1 do not 
seriously think a thing good unless I prefer it to what is indifferent 
or bad, and such a preference involves not a mere cognitive or 
detached intellectual state, but an attitude which may be called 


‘conditions either frustrate or do or require effort, expresses 
itself in emotion or in simple enjoyment or suffering as the case 
may be. Good and bad are terms for objects of experience about 
which. we feel. The good object is, as such, and apart from 
incidental counteracting causes, one in which we find pleasure 
and one which we seek to produce and maintain as long as the 
pleasure lasts. There is here a harmony—that is, a relation of 
mutual support between the object and the feeling, for the 
feeling is maintained by the object and also gives rise to the 
effort to maintain and complete the object. Conversely, where 
there is pain there is disharmony, the effort here being to the 
arrest of the experience, and removal or destruction of the object. 
If there were in existence only one consciousness with only one 
object of pleasure its efforts would be solely directed towards 
P P. 


4 
, 


578 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


the maintenance of that object and the removal of all else. 
But there are many objects of pleasurable and painful conscious- 
ness, and between them there is often a practical inconsistency, . 
the conditions which produce pleasure in one relation producing 
pain in anothers Now the rational impulse is as intolerant of 
this practical inconsistency as of theoretical inconsistency. On 
the practical side, accordingly, it is the impulse towards a 
harmony of feeling which should make life one in its purpose, 
just as on the cognitive side it is an effort towards a harmony 
of judgments making thought one in its principle. Practical 
reason, then, may be simply defined as the basis of harmony 
in the world of purposes. This harmony is no more to be 
achieved without a re-modelling of impulses than consistency of 
thought without a re-casting of judgments. For (a) my own 
purposes may conflict with one another, and (b) any or all of 
them may conflict with those of another person. All such 
conflict exists for the practical reason only as an obstacle 
to be overcome, just as contradiction exists for the speculative — 
reason only as a difficulty to be resolved. It makes no difference 
whether the conflict is due to difference of persons, of com- 
munities, or merely of tendencies within one mind, for the 
reason is no respecter of persons or of anything partial except 
so far as it can be brought into a harmony of the whole. / This 
harmony has behind it the sum of all the driving force of feeling, 
impulse, will, which it has brought within its scope, and its 
authority is independent of the concurrence of any particular 
impulse or any particular person because it is rationally estab- 
lished, and has already given to the objection such weight as 


_..in_an impartial regard to the whole system of purpose is its due. 


It is objectively valid in the sense in which this term can he 
applied to purpose, 2.¢. in the sense that it is rationally estab- 
lished. Now the plenitude of such authority could only attach 
to a completed system, but as in knowledge, so in action, the 


1 For want of recognition of its universal character the practical reason 
is too often identified with prudence and so with egoism. The reason is 
here thought of as a purely intellectual process of the adaptation of means 
to ends, and the ends are conceived as determined by personal desires 
alone. This view ignores the elements of impulse-feeling which connect 
every man but an idiot directly with some others and potentially with 
all others, and missing the character of practical reason as an impulse it 
also fails to grasp its aim, which is to unify not my purposes or yours, 
but all purposes. In this impulse all that tends to bind humanity—we 
may even say the sentient world—into one is summed up. 

Conversely, the unity of the world of mind is generally conceived as 
something mystical. The truth is that its binding thread is just practical — 
rationality, including therein all the elements of emotion and conation 
that go to make up the rational impulse. 


MODERN ETHICS 579 


rational impulse is authoritative against any counter impulse 
although its results are incomplete, and the individual is there- 
_ fore under obligation to the working code that it has produced 
except in so far as he can point the way to a fuller harmony. 


4. But in what sense would it “bind” him? This is generally 
taken as resolvable into the more precise question, ‘‘ What will 
befall him if he ignore it?’’ Accepting the question in this) 
form, let us from the outset insist that this consequence is not} 
essentially or universally a loss of personal happiness. Admit- -| 
ting all that can be said of the pangs of remorse and the blessed- 
ness of martyrdom, we should still be, to say the least, unwise 
to stake anything on the possibility of proving that a loss of 
conscious, realized happiness attends every fall from virtue or 
refusal of duty. We may, if we please, maintain that it is well 
with the man who does his duty to his worldly loss, and ill with 
him who rejects it, but in speaking confidently on the point, 
we can only be judging them from outside. We are measuring 
them by that standard of merit to which we think men should 
conform, to which we ourselves wish to conform. We are not 
judging by the conscious happiness or misery which the two men 
experience, for we have no means of deciding with certainty 
what that consciousness is. If, indeed, we assume both of them 
to be animated alike by this same desire to conform to the rule 
of human duty which our judgment on them postulates, then 
we may impute those feelings of inward peace on the one hand, 
and lasting remorse on the other, which we know to be in average 
humanity determining factors in the balance of happiness and 
misery. But suppose that we have to deal on the one side with 

a conscientious soul much tried and often sore bested in the 
race, and on the other with a consciousness which gradually, | 
perhaps half deliberately, blunts its moral feelings and loses the | 
sting of shame. We may say with confidence that the second 
_ is a lower type, but we cannot with equal confidence assume 
that it experiences more unhappiness. Indeed, the probability 
lies in the opposite direction, and if, nevertheless, we persist that 
if we had to choose we would prefer for ourselves the former 
character, we do so on the ground that something other than 
our own happiness is the motive which does and should move 
us, and that it is better to be half a hero and miserable than 
a whole-hearted brute,’ satisfied with brutishness. Such a con- 
clusion is,in fact, held in germ in the bare conception of a moral 
obligation that is not merely a superior and more exact calcu- 
lation of the elements of personal happiness and misery. In 


580 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


our thinking on this subject we are too often tempted to get 
the best of both worlds, to claim superiority to all selfish con- 


siderations when insisting boldly on the supremacy of the moral | 


law, and then, by an elastic interpretation of happiness, to make 


terms with prudence and insist that even from this point of © 


view the faithful servant of duty is proved wise in his generation. 
We are aided in this double feeling by phrases and turns of 
thought which enable us to identify Happiness and the Good. 
These terms are, indeed, closely related. We find happiness in 
conscious realization of the good, but we may attain the good 
without knowing it, or we may strive towards a supreme good 
at the cost of pain and misery which in the actual measurement 
of conscious feeling would probably far outweigh such satis- 
faction as our poor onward efforts may bring. Once admit and 
resolutely adhere to the admission that happiness is a condition 
of our conscious life, and we bring clearly into relief the truth 
that the ethical conception of the good carries us beyond our 
own’ conscious being and forbids us to look for a reward there. 
This deduction fairly faced, we come back to the conception 
of obligation as resting on the relation of self to others, or more 
broadly, on the position of each man as a member of the great 


whole in which, insignificant part as he is, he has his function | 


to perform. It is that in him which answers to this position 
which realizes, however dimly, the nature of the whole to which 
he belongs,/which drives him on and impels him even through 
the wreck of his own happiness and the ruin of his personal 
desires to play his part. In a perfect human being, indeed, 
all such conflicting desires would be overcome. If we imagine 
the reason within a man finding a perfectly rational order of 
ideas to guide it, and responding by carrying its own work of 
,re-moulding impulse to completion, we should have a character 
‘in which every impulse would of itself fit into an ordered whole. 
For such a being no satisfaction could be found outside the 
_performance of the duties falling to his lot, and thus for him 
‘the antithesis of happiness and duty would be overcome. We 
do not find this perfection in real life, but we find the mirror 
of it, or rather a fragment of it, wherever there is love. For 
here, too, happiness rests in seryice, and there can be no joy in 
satisfaction gained at the expense of the loved object. Hence 
the few men gifted with the genius of love which enables them 
to feel for mankind what ordinary men feel for wife or child, 
have always stood forth as the teachers capable of inspiring the 
world with a new gospel. In ordinary humanity we do not 
find the perfect adaptation of the impulses to the service of the 


MODERN ETHICS 581 


whole. But neither do we find outside the asylum a reign of 
purely anarchic impulse. There is a movement towards har- 
mony which gives a certain general direction to our lives, and 
which has within it all the gathered-up forces of the impulses 
which it has brought into a synthesis. ‘The pressure of this 


system on any impulse that conflicts with it is what we feel. 


as obligation. This system may, of course, be formed on narrow 
lines and then it only leads us astray, but so far as it is the 
work of the rational impulse it tends to bring each of us into 
harmony with the world of life about him. The adaptation in 
the perfect state in which all emotion is attuned to it is experi- 
enced as loye; in its incomplete state, when the system has 
to maintain itself with effort against unreconciled elements, as 
duty. Finally, the constraint which it so exercises is one that 
we recognize as just and valid in proportion as we are reasonable 
beings—that is, in a word, the obligation is rationally. justified. 
This implies that man is bound by spiritual ties to a community 
with a life and purpose of its own. But the tie is not such as 
to destroy his separate personality, but rather such that, like 
Love, it maintains the distinctness of the persons whom it binds 
together, and hence, though the whole to which he belongs may 
be called a spiritual whole, it is only by metaphor a self or a 
person. More strictly it should be a Spiritual whole in the true 
conception of which Personality is a subordinate element. If 
this conclusion is correct, the problem of finding the principles 


of a rational moral order resolves itself into that of formulating | 
the nature and supreme purposes of the whole to which man’ 
belongs. To the efforts made by modern thought in this direction | 


we must now turn. 


5. Here, once again, modern thought starts with the idea of 
“nature.”’ The conception of a Law of Nature binding on man 
as man had been adopted by the Church, which extended the 
conception by adding to the principles implanted in human 
nature itself those revealed in Holy Writ. ‘These two sources 
of law are set forth at the outset of the Decretum Gratiani as 
together distinguished from the positive law of states. 


“Humanum genus duobus regitur, naturali videlicet jure 
et moribus. Jus nature est, quod in lege et evangelio con- 
tinetur, quo quisque jubetur alii facere, quod sibi vult fieri, et 
prohibetur alii inferre, quod sibi nolit fieri.”’ ? 


1 Here the term super-personal, employed by some idealists, points in 
the right direction. 
2 Decr. Grat., C.J. 1. 


{ 


582 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


This is an ethical rather than a juristic principle. What follows 
corresponds better both to the ancient and modern idea of 
“natural ”’ laws. 


“ Jus naturale est commune omnium nationum, eo quod ubique 
instinctu nature, non constitutione aliqua habetur, ut viri et 
femine conjunctio, liberorum successio et educatio, communis 
omnium possessio et omnium una libertas, acquisitio eorum que 
caelo, terra marique capiuntur; item deposits rei vel commen- 
date pecuniz restitutio, violentiz per vim repulsio.” + 


The just supremacy of natural over state law is asserted by 
Gratian, and the authority of Augustine? and other Fathers 
adduced in its favour. The same doctrine is maintained by 
St. Thomas, and the Law of Nature, which was destined to 
become the associate and leader of revolutionaries, entered 
upon the modern period with all the odour of sanctity. 

But it was not till the decay of theological ethics had begun 
that it assumed any real importance. Monotheism had divided 
reality into the natural and the supernatural, and when the one 
began to lose authority men turned to the other as of course. 
* The Law of Nature provided a basis for morals, a standard for 
law, and a rule of conduct where no law was., It was in the 
last capacity in particular that it emerged as a working factor 
inthought. The Reformation had torn Western Europe asunder, 
and so destroyed that spiritual headship of the popes which 
had provided some sort of common authority for the rival 
powers which it contained. The belief grew up that in inter- 
national matters men were bound by no obligations whatever, 
and the belief was practically exemplified in the amazing horrors 
of sixteenth and seventeenth century warfare. The thinkers 
who sought to remedy an evil which had almost destroyed 
civilization in Germany, turned to the old antithesis between 
nature and human convention. They appealed to the concep- 
tion of a natural law which all parties recognized, and which, 
being prior to political sovereignty, could be recognized by 
warring states without prejudice to their independence. Con- 
fining ourselves to Grotius as the most influential of the school, 
it is interesting to see how he conceives the Law of Nature, 
Combating the assumption that every animal seeks its own 
advantage, he lays down that there is in man (and even in 
some lower animals) an appetitus socieiatis, a desire for com- 

1 Decr. Grat., C. J., 2. 


2 In the passages cited Augustine seems to have “‘ divine ’’ rather than 


“natural ”’ law in view, but they are treated as the same by Gratian (see 
pp. 13-16). 


MODERN ETHICS 583 


munity, and that not of any kind but of a tranquil kind, ordered 
in a manner congruous to his intelligence. We find an impulse 
_ to benefit others among certain of the animals and in infants 
anterior to any education. This social tendency is the fountain 
of natural law to which belong the obligations of “ abstaining 
from what is another’s, restitution of deposits, fulfilling con- 
tracts, reparation for culpable injuries and administering due 
punishment.” + Further, since fulfilment of contracts is a part 
of natural law, and since a compact is the foundation of society, 
natural law is indirectly the source from which state laws flow. 
Lastly, though natural law would have force even if there were 
no God, or if He were indifferent to human things, in fact all 
Christians believe that He will punish disobedience to His law, 
and natural law, though it proceeds ex principiis homini internis, 
is still ultimately ascribable to Him as the fashioner of human 
nature.” Natural law, then, was something based on the nature 
of man as such, independent, therefore, of the whims of kings, 
nobles, or majorities, no respecter of the national boundaries 
or of any other differences that part groups of men, binding even 
on sovereign powers. 

In elevating human personality above social convention and 
making its essential attributes tacitly, if not expressedly, the 
groundwork of political obligation, the law or nature was one 
way of formulating the most vital tendency in modern ethical 
thought. Moreover, it appeared to provide the fixed standard 
which in the decay of the supernatural was required by the 
ethical thinkers. But in this respect its promises were in large 
measure delusive. What precisely was natural was, and always 
has been, hard to say. If it was open to Grotius to maintain 
that man was naturally social and the fundamental laws of 
society were deductions from the law of nature, it was also 
possible for Hobbes to assert that man was by nature selfish, 
and that no social law could be produced from human nature 
if it were not for the fear that men entertain of one another. 
- The Canon Law might lay down that by nature all things are in 
common, while Grotius and Locke would agree that respect for 
others’ property was a natural law. In one sense everything 
that occurs is natural and everything that men do arises out of 
human nature, and if that view is pressed the whole difference 
between the natural and conventional disappears. Government 
is natural, even the freaks of a fashion are natural. It is 
certainly in human nature to tyrannize and domineer quite 
as much as it is in human nature to respect the equal rights of 


1 Grotius, Prolegomena, 5-9. ; ab., secs, 11, 12. 


584 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


another. ‘In this sense clearly nature means too much to be 
of any value as a term in ethics, but if, on the other hand, the 
permanent and fundamental conditions of human nature are 
meant, the question arises how the fundamental is to be dis- 
tinguished from the accidental and temporary, and the use of 
the term natural itself provides no test. y Lastly, if natural means 
the ideal, the term which is really wanted when we speak of a 
standard by which laws and customs are to be renovated, then 
the canon of what always has been is insufficient for our pur- 
poses in so far as the natural falls short of the possible, and we 
could only identify the natural and the ideal by making unhis- 
torical assumptions as to a state of nature in the Golden Age, 
which can do nothing but mislead. 

In regard to the “natural rights’ of man, definiteness was 
given to the doctrine by the complementary theory of social 
compact. Certain primary rights belong to a man as a human 
creature, and not merely as a member of society. They are 
regarded rather as attributes in individuals than as elements in 
a social system. Society is founded upon a contract whereby 
individuals yield up a portion of these rights in order to secure 
mutual aid in enforcing those which they retain. Thus, while 
political or legal rights flow from the constitution of society, 
natural rights are the unexhausted residue of the original stock 
with which men are endowed. So much is common ground to 
upholders of the social contract from Hobbes to Rousseau and 
Paine, though they differ as to the conditions under which the 
contract was formed, and to the extent to which and the form 
in which the barter of natural for civil rights was effected. The 
general theory is very clearly stated by Paine. 


99 


‘“‘ Natural rights are those which appertain to man in right of 
his existence. . . . Civil rights are those which appertain to man 
in right of his being a member of society. Every civil right has 
for its foundation some natural right pre-existing in the indi- 
vidual, but to the enjoyment of which his individual power is 
not, in all cases, sufficiently competent. Of this kind are all 
those which relate to security and protection.” 1 


From this principle it follows that opposite deductions might 
be drawn, and in fact were drawn, as to the sphere and functions 
of government. It might be used, as with Hobbes, to support 
despotism; or, as by Locke, to prove that a king who does not 
keep an implied contract with his people may be dethroned ; 
or, aS by Rousseau, to prove the ultimate and indefeasible 


* Rights of Man, p. 306, 


MODERN ETHICS 585 


_ sovereignty of the people as a whole. This last conception 
_ underlies a good deal of modern political thought, and we must 
note what it implies. The conception of natural rights, then, 
leads in Rousseau’s argument to popular sovereignty, because in 
the compact upon which society rests each man surrenders his 
own rights only in return for equal consideration in the decisions 
taken by the whole community. On the other hand, while the 
absoluteness of popular sovereignty is thus deduced from the 
doctrine of natural rights, it is limited by the same doctrine, for 
it may be held that in the exchange of natural for civil rights 
men do not part with all their rights, but assign some only to 
society, retaining those which are necessary to the inherent 
safety and dignity of the human personality. This point of 
view, in fact, underlies the Declaration of Rights by the French 
National Assembly. The theory is very clearly expressed by 
Paine. It is— 


“ First—That every civil right grows out of a natural right; 
or, in other words, is a natural right exchanged. 

““Secondly—That civil power, properly considered as such, 
is made up of the aggregate of that class of the natural rights 
of man, which becomes defective in the individual in point of 
power, and answers not his purpose, but when collected to a 
focus becomes competent to the purpose of every one. 

“ Thirdly—That the power produced from the aggregate of 
natural rights, imperfect in power in the individual, cannot be 
applied to invade the natural rights which are retained in the 
individual, and in which the power to execute is as perfect as 
the right itself.” 4 


The first six clauses of the Declaration of the Rights of Man 
show how the leaders of the French Revolution endeavoured to 
give practical shape to these ideas. 


“1. Men are born, and always continue, free and equal in 
respect of their rights. Civil distinctions, therefore, can be 
founded only on public utility. 

“2. The end of all political associations is the preservation of 
the natural and imprescriptible rights of man; and these rights 
are liberty, property, security, and resistance of oppression. 

“3. The nation is essentially the source of all sovereignty ; 
nor can any individual, or any body of men, be entitled to any 
authority which is not expressly derived from it. 

“4. Political Liberty consists in the power of doing whatever 
does not injure another. The exercise of the natural rights of 
every man has no other limits than those which are necessary 


* Paine, 307, 


586 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


to secure to every other man the free exercise of the same rights; 
and these limits are determinable only by the law. 

“5. The law ought to prohibit only actions hurtful to . 
BOCICLY. a) «is 

“6, The law is an expression of the will of the community. 
All citizens have a right to concur either personally or by their 
representatives in its formation.” 1... 


We may sum up in a single sentence this expression of the 
creed in which the doctrine of the law of nature had culminated. 
Freedom, equal rights and security of person and property, 
limited only by considerations of public utility as determined 
by a sovereign people, this is the only moral basis of govern- 
ment. These principles insist upon the claims of human person- 
ality more fully than any previous ethical system had done; 
in so doing, and also, it must be granted, in placing a limit on 
the function of the state, they expressed a tendency with which 
the modern mind was, on the whole, in sympathy. 

The state is thus conceived as having a sphere carved out of 
the original totality of rights in accordance with the necessities 
of the social compact. It figures as a necessary derogation from 
the plenitude of individual freedom—a necessary evil which, 
whenever it passes these natural limits, becomes a positive evil. 
The good the state can do is negative. It is the free individual 
on whom progress depends. In this conclusion yet another 
element in the conception of “nature ’’ co-operated—the tend- 
ency to identify what is natural with what is best—a tendency 
which we find alike in the Physiocrats and in Adam Smith, 
and which was bequeathed by them to the economists of the 
first half of the nineteenth century. Not only had men a natural 
right to freedom in industry and trade, but the natural course 
of industry and exchange produced the best economic results. 
The industrial and commercial mechanism became perfect in 
proportion as it was allowed to run without interference from 
the central government. Under “natural ’’ conditions, 7. e. in 
the absence of attempts at collective direction, rent, profits, 
interest, wages, find their level. Any attempt to disturb this 
level produces a recoil, involving friction, waste and misery. 
Under natural conditions production finds for itself the course 
of greatest profit and least waste. The need that men have of 
one another makes them insensibly find the line of least resist- 
ance in their mutual dealings, and what that line will be none 
can tell for each individual so well as he himself. He moves 
precisely where his interest draws him, and to deflect him from 

1 From Paine’s Rights of Man, pp. 351, 352. 


MODERN ETHICS 587 


the line of movement is to inflict on him and on others whose 
interests are involved in free dealings with him a net loss. 

Thus in various forms—now as a-Universal Law, now as a 
Primitive State, now as the source of indestructible right, and 
again as a beneficent tendency of things—the idea of nature 
formed a setting for men’s thoughts on social ethics. It lent 
itself with an elasticity that was all its own to the varying 
needs of successive thinkers. But so far as it had a fixed mean- 
ing in social philosophy, it expressed the antithesis to the de- 
liberate action of governments, and thus it was well fitted to 
serve as a rallying point for the modern political movement, the 
object of which, put in the most general terms, was to substitute 
the state based upon consent for the régime of governmental 
authority based on force. The conception of nature was a 
useful lever in the demolition of the old structure of monarchical 
absolutism and feudal privilege, wherein government very readily 
appeared as something imposed on the mass of the community 
from outside instead of springing from their own “nature ”’ 
within. For the most part it was only too true that the less 
such governments meddled with affairs, the better it was for 
the people concerned. It was true that the social structure 
which they preserved was not natural as resting either on 
the fitness of things or on permanent and insuperable necessities 
of human nature. Nor was it only the destructive side of 
the movement that the idea of nature expressed. In a dim 
and somewhat inarticulate fashion the term stood for funda- 
mental conditions of human welfare, and in particular for the 
claims of human personality as independent of and superior to 
all legal and political obligations. Round the central conception 
range, as shown above (Part I., Summary), all the rights claimed 
by the modern man and woman, and those rights are one pole 
of modern ethics and of the modern state. 


6.\But when the question of the more precise definition of 
these rights arises, the limitations of the doctrine become 
apparent and the other pole of ethics comes into view. No 
right can be made absolute without threatening the destruction 
of society, and it is impossible to discuss the adjustment of any 
claims of the individual for many sentences without admitting 
a reference to the common welfare or some such principle. This 
is the point of departure for Bentham’s criticism. The so- 
called Rights of man were, according to him, so many “ anar- 
chical fallacies.” A man had a right to so much as was con- 
sistent with the general happiness, and no more. About the 


588 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


cause of happiness and misery one can inquire and debate, and 
finally prove an opinion or disprove it. But as to rights men 
can debate endlessly and prove nothing. 


“To any such word as right, no other conception can ever 
be attached but through the medium of a law, or something to 
which the force of law is given; from a real law comes a real 
right ; from an imagined law nothing more substantial can come 
than a correspondently imagined right. Lay out of the question 
the idea of law, and all that you get by the use of the word right 
is a sound to dispute about. I say I have aright; I say you 
have no such right : men may keep talking on at that rate till 
they are exhausted in vociferation and rage; and, when they 
have done, be no nearer to the coming to a mutual conception 
and agreement than they were before.” + 


The argument could only be settled by reference to’ the 
higher principle of the general welfare, which both disputants 
could accept. If there is no common good which both admit, 
definable in terms which both can recognize, there is nothing 
to limit the possible claims of each. But the common good is, 
after all, a vague phrase. Could any means be found of so 
defining it as to make it an objective test of the right and wrong 
of action? Such means the Utilitarians (if the name may 
be applied retrospectively) conceived themselves to have dis- 
covered in the calculus of pleasures and of pains. The general 
happiness was the supreme end of creation. Happiness con- 
sisted positively in the consciousness of pleasure, negatively 
in the avoidance of pain. The goodness of a form of govern- 
ment, a social or political institution, a law, or a moral rule, 
might thus be submitted to a positive and objective test. Did 
it on the whole produce more happiness than misery? If so, it 
was good. Did it produce a balance of pain? If so, it was bad. 
Here was an objective test which a perfected sociological science 
(here the word must be allowed prospectively) might carry out 
into detail. In point of fact Bentham set himself to work out 


a theory of law and government upon that basis. But the first. 


condition of any such undertaking was that rights should be 
reduced from their proud position. They were not fundamental 
and inviolable principles, but were means to anend. If freedom 
in any given direction promotes the general happiness—well and 
good. Menhave aright to that kind offreedom. lLetit beshown 
however, that such freedom tends to produce a balance of pain, 
and the right disappears. Rights, then, are related to the happi- 


1 Bentham, Securities against Misrule adapted to a Mohammedan State, 
1822-23, chap. i.; Works, vol. vii. p. 557, 


MODERN ETHICS 589 


ness of mankind. On the other hand, the two most important 
“rights of man”’ are, in point of fact, incorporated in Bentham’s 
scheme. Equality, in fact, may be said to be its corner-stone— 
** Everybody to count for one and nobody for more than one.” 


“The happiness of the most helpless pauper constitutes as 
large a portion of the universal happiness, as does that of the 
most powerful, the most opulent member of the community. 
Therefore the happiness of the most helpless and indigent has as 
much title to regard at the hands of the legislator, as that of the 
most powerful and opulent.” 1 


The thought here appears to be that happiness is the sole end 
of value, and that any person’s happiness is of equal value with 
any other person’s. As in Kant, impartiality between persons 
is the foundation of morality. Individual liberty was also well 
provided for. The close relation of private and general happi- 
hess was an essential part of the scheme. Whether by en- 
lightened self-interest or by the cultivation of the social feel- 
ings men could come to identify their good with that of other 
people, and it was to this free choice rather than to any form 
of compulsion that the Utilitarians as a whole mainly trusted. 
On the other hand, since power in the hands of one man or 
of a few might be used selfishly, it was necessary that each 
man should have a share in determining the government of 
the country, and so the third of the great “‘ideas of °89”’ is 
reached by another path. There must be democratic govern- 
ment, not because popular sovereignty is a matter of absolute 
right deducible from the imagined character of a fictitious social 
compact, but because it is the only way to check the selfishness 
of rulers and so ensure the general happiness. 

In this statement government is still tacitly conceived as 
essentially an infringement on the sphere of the individual, a 
necessary evil, the encroachments of which must be carefully 
watched. This attitude to government is not, indeed, essential 
to the Utilitarian principles, but it is characteristic of the phase 
of thought to which Utilitarianism historically belongs. In 
the Utilitarian method, society is still thought of in terms of 
‘““numbers ”’ of people whose feelings of happiness and misery 
can be added and subtracted, rather than as a whole, in which 
the injury of any one part is apt to spread its bad influence 
through the body. With the same tendency, an even more 
vital defect is connected. To make general happiness the 
standard of law and morals was an immense advance in the 


1 Const. Code, Book I. chap. xv. sec. 7; Works, vol. 1x.)\py TO7. 5. CL, 
Mill’s Utilitarianism, chap. v. p. 92. 


590 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


direction of defining the moral idea upon the old conception of — 


nature, and in Bentham’s hands it could initiate a valuable and 


far-reaching series of reforms. Yet to make happiness the sole — 


criterion, as though the kind of objective life in-which men- find ~ 


happiness were unimportant, was a mistake. which hampered 
Utilitarianism from the outset in accounting for moral obliga- 
tion. Even if happiness were in theory the ultimate end, it 
was not sufficiently recognized—unless, perhaps, by the younger 


Mill—that the kind of life in which happiness is found_is_all-_ 


important. The happiness of one section, or of one generation, 
might be purchased at the expense of misery in the future, and 
if this was to be avoided and an intelligent view of the per- 
manent conditions of happiness for mankind at large was to be 
obtained, it was necessary to make the laws of healthy social 
development the object of study and the direct standard of 
conduct, / The direct application of the Greatest Happiness 
principle might be applied with success to the flagrant abuses 
with which the men of Bentham’s day had to contend, but as 
more controversial questions arise and greater scientific pre- 
cision is needed, the calculus of pleasures and pains becomes 
inapplicable. We cannot think out the value of action in terms 
of the indefinitely large number of persons affected. We do not 
know where to stop in taking consequences into account, and 
the thread of causation is lost as we endeavour mentally to 
follow it into the dim distance. If we are to trace social cause 
and effect with any hope of securing tangible and well-grounded 
results, we must therefore start from the other end. We must 
think of the corporate life of society and inquire whether it 
exhibits any laws of health, of growth or decay, and so far as 
we can ascertain such laws we may judge of the broad effects 
of conduct. 


7. Thus on several sides the Utilitarian method needed to be 
supplemented by a conception of the collective social life of 
humanity emerging and maturing under conditions which it is 
the supreme object of practical wisdom to ascertain and under- 
stand. Such a conception had already entered into modern 
thought with the work of writers like Vico and Montesquieu, 
and formed the basis of an historical treatment of sociology. 
From these it passed through Condorcet and the St. Simonians 
to Comte and his disciples. In another incarnation it inspired 
the Hegelian philosophy of history. Amid great variations, not 
merely in detail but in the whole handling of the subject, his- 
torical sociology leads to certain fairly well marked views on 


MODERN ETHICS 591 


questions of ethical principle. First of all, it lays down that 
neither duties nor rights can be studied without a knowledge 
of social conditions, for without society there is neither duty nor 
right. But further, social conditions are not the same every- 
where or at every time. The relations on which the preacher of 
absolute right and wrong would rest his moral laws are them- 
selves moving relations. Humanity is a growing organism, and 
the problem of the thinker is to understand the laws of its 
growth and adjust the code of conduct which his disciples are 
to preach to the needs of the present phase. For though there 
are “laws” of social growth, we are not to suppose that the 
result is so determined as to be wholly beyond the power of 
human intelligence to modify. There are “laws” of health, yet 
there is a use for doctors. It is so far as we understand the 
laws of social life that we can hope to affect it intelligently, and 
in point of fact it is of the essence of its growth that humanity 
becomes conscious of itself ; that is to say, more and more aware 
of the conditions upon which its happiness and progress depend, 
and so capable of self-direction. In this conception of a self- 
directing humanity lies the basis of scientific ethics. 

As conceived by Comte, it was more than a basis of ethics. 
Collective humanity, as a being that never dies, but grows, learns 
and develops throughout the ages, was to be the object of a 
new religion, a religion dealing with realities and based on 
science, that should put behind it for ever the dreams of the 
theologians and the cobwebs of metaphysics. Whatever there 
was of spiritual good was to be found in the life of humanity, 
in the relations of human beings to one another, and nowhere 
else in the world. With regard to the ultimate origin and 
basis of things, men could imagine what they pleased, but no 
_ absolute truth was obtainable. Throughout history schemes of 
theology had arisen, flourished and decayed. They had come 
into being to meet some intellectual or moral need of mankind. 
They had flourished so long as they satisfied that want; they 
_had perished when other wants arose, when deeper questions 
were asked, when they no longer fitted the more developed 
character of the race. Their strength lay not in their truth, but 
always in their practical value. For humanity had worked out 
empirically, as it were, in a blind, groping, unconscious manner, 
both the fundamental institutions necessary to its existence, 
such as marriage, property and government, and also the ethical 
and religious systems which were suited to each stage of its 
development. But in all cases there was a large admixture of 
_ error, and it was the problem for a scientific religion to maintain 


592 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


the truth, letting the shell of error drop off. The gods, taken 
at their best, were incarnations of essentially human relations, 
human feelings, human duties. Could not these human relations, 
these human duties, be made objects of reverence apart from 
the shell in which they had hitherto lived, and would they not 
be purer so conceived? For the very process of incarnation had 
robbed the spiritual of half its character. By transferring it 
to a supernatural world, it had given ground for the suggestion 
that it had no application to this world, and based it on dogmas 
which proved a treacherous support, instead of allowing it to 
stand by its own inherent strength. The problem of positive 
religion was to restore virtue and righteousness, charity and 
justice, to their true dignity, to recognize in them a positive 
value as integral elements in the noblest life of humanity, 
requiring no sanction, theological or metaphysical, to back them 
up, but relying on their own inherent beauty and strength. 
But theological religion at its best, as seen in the medieval 
Church, had provided a rule for all life. It had presided over 
every occasion; it had been present at birth, marriage and 
death, in sickness and in health, in good and evil fortune, en- 
couraging saintship, heroism and devotion, comforting misery 
and cheering the penitent. In all these directions the conception 
of humanity was to fulfil the same function; it was the focus 
and meeting-point of all good and resolute effort ; the humblest 
devotee of science no less than the greatest philosophic intelli- 
gence was contributing to its progress. The statesman, the 
man of affairs, the captain of industry, had their function, did 
their service in forwarding the progressive organization of life. 
The poet, the musician, the artist inspired or expressed the 
onward movement of the human spirit. All past history was 
lit up by the conception of this great movement to which all 
previous efforts of humanity pointed. <A positive religion would 
provide for a renovated worship of saints and heroes in the 
persons of all who had contributed to the march of the human 
mind. The light thus reflected on the past shone even more 
brightly upon the present. Every social effort, every endeavour 
to the furtherance of knowledge, art or industry received a new 
dignity when considered as contributing, each in its degree, to 
one great, all-embracing cause. Nor were the minor interests 
of life swamped by the supreme conception. Religion and 
humanity preached no vague diffused benevolence which should 
override the more direct and personal ties that bind us to our 
family, our neighbour and our country. On the contrary, all 
these had their place. Each was recognized as intrinsically a 


MODERN ETHICS 593 


worthy object of devotion, only it must be a devotion limited 
by the broad requirements of the human religion—that is to say, 
it must be a devotion purged of the elements of collective pride 
and selfishness. We must love our country, but not so as to 
wish it to dominate all others. Our chief pride in it must lie 
in our sense of the service that it renders to humanity, just as 
the only legitimate pride that we can feel in our own achieve- 
ments or in the career of those near and dear to us should de- 
pend on the extent to which those achievements or that career 
has been of service to the world at large. Humanity was not 
to override those fundamental attachments which make up 
the larger part of practical life for all of us. It was to purify 
and co-ordinate them, to infuse into them a spirit of wider 
sympathy, to elevate them by a deeper sense of their meaning 
and value. 

The peculiar form given to humanitarianism by Comte has 
been criticized from many points of view. Fundamentally it is 
objected that it propounds to us the worship either of a vague 
impalpable abstraction, or, if we reduce humanity to concrete 
terms, of ourselves—weak, imperfect beings as we are. To 
this, one of Comte’s ablest disciples replies that the conception 
of humanity as the goal and basis of human effort is misunder- 
stood. 


“No one thinks that when he mentions the word England or 
France or Germany, he is talking of a ghost or a phantom. Nor 
does he mean a vast collection of so many millions of men in 
the abstract; so many million ghosts. Man in the abstract is 
of all abstractions the most unreal. By England we mean the 
prejudices, customs, traditions, history, peculiar to Englishmen, 
summed up in the present generation, in the living representa- 
tives of the past history. So with Humanity. .. . Is such a 
religion self-worship? . . . What explains the error is the belief 
that by Humanity we mean the same thing as the human race. 
We mean something widely different. Of each man’s life, one 
part has been personal, the other social: one part consists in 
actions for the common good, the other part in actions of pure 
self-indulgence, and even of active hostility to the common 
welfare. Such actions retard the progress of Humanity, though 
they cannot arrest it: they disappear, perish, and are finally 
forgotten. There are lives wholly made up of actions such as 
these. They form no part of Humanity. Humanity consists 
only of such lives, and only of those parts of each man’s life, 
which are impersonal, which are social, which have converged to 
the common good.” } 

1 J. H. Bridges, Hssays and Addresses, pp. 86-88. 


QQ 


594 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


It would seem from this that the conception of Humanity is 
men and women. It is rather that of a Spirit pervading human 
beings and their life; not, indeed, a Being outside and over 
above men and women, but a Being that is the best of them— 
the good that is in each working together—the spiritual whole 
so constituted.t 

When stated in these terms the conception of Humanity 
comes into close relation with a conception towards which the 
metaphysical method which Comte rejected had made indepen- 
dent advances. The Hegelian philosophy, for example, conceived 
history as a process wherein the Spirit, continually seeking 
realization, arrives finally at self-consciousness. Allowing for 
difference of terminology and for the more essential point of 
divergence that Positivism is a theory of practice, Hegelianism 
a theory of the ultimate nature of reality, this is, after all, some- 
thing very close to the idea of humanity as a name for all that 
makes for good in men winning through the long struggles 
of historical development to consciousness of itself, and the 
deliberate guidance of its own life. In either case it is at bottom 
the idea of the development of the divine in man that is used 
as a solution of ethical and religious problems. From such 
opposite poles do we approach an idea which would seem to be 
at the heart of modern thought. The God of Monotheism, as 
the ideally perfect Being, became, as we saw, separated from 
the world as its Creator and Ruler. From this separation arose 
ethical problems which might be concealed under a mass of 
optimistic verbiage, but were incapable of any genuine solution 
on the basis of an unconditional creation of things by a Being 
who is perfect in himself. We have seen the partial recognition 
of this impasse, pointing religious thinkers through the theory 

1 If it be said that such a unity of individual distinct minds can only 
have a mystical meaning, it may be replied that it is precisely the kind of 
unity towards which the passage quoted above from Dr. Bridges points. 
If, further, it is alleged that only the individual minds are real and that a 
totality constituted by them is not a real being, the reply is that this is 
a form of the nominalist fallacy. The totality is not another individual 
similar to those which compose it, but is none the less the real being which 
together they make up. All the vital processes of the human body pro- 
ceed in separate cells. The body itself is not another cell, but neither is it 
a mystic creation. It is the totality of the cells, and its life the totality of 
the cellular processes. So in all probability conscious life depends, not on 
a process in any one cell of the brain, but in multitudinous processes carried 
on simultaneously in cells that lie far apart in the cerebral mass. Yet 
consciousness is one. So the Mind of Humanity is the unity in process of 


formation of multitudinous minds of men. To call it “mind ” may be 


metaphorical and inadequate. But to call it a real agency is, I think, 
literal prose. 


MODERN ETHICS 595 


of Free Will to an educative conception of the dealings of God 
with man. Idealism, carrying this further, has sought to over- 
come the cleavage involved in Monotheism, to bring back the 
divine Creator into the undivine created world. It has thus 
been led by a very roundabout road to a transfigured version of 
that indwelling Spirit with which religion starts, a Spirit which 
dwells in things instead of controlling them from without. When 
the attributes of this Spirit are frankly criticized they are found 
to imply that it is not the whole of nature, but is conditioned 
by nature even while shaping it, and strives with things, though 
they are its own flesh; and only through the evolutionary 
process which science, as well as philosophy, recognizes, presses 
on to that final and complete domination of the conditions of 
existence which the earlier theory attributed to it at its point of 
departure as the starting point and origin of Creation. 

The conception of Development has been applied and extended 
by physical science. Biology has carried it far beyond the 
limits of human history and applied it to all forms of life. Con- 
temporary physics and chemistry are using it to explain the 
constitution of inanimate matter. However little thinkers may 
agree about its philosophic interpretation, the idea of Develop- 
ment is the central conception of modern thought, and the idea of 
Humanity in development holds that place in modern ethics.1 

—if we consider carefully the differences of interpretation which 
distinguish different schools of thought, we shall find that they 
turn largely on the value of this conception—or, indeed, of any 
conception derived from human experience as an expression 
of the ultimate nature of reality. The self-conscious Spirit of 
Hegel, and the self-directing Humanity of Comte, for example, 


1 Itis one of the ironies incidental to the development of thought that 
the biological theory of evolution, which was precisely the contribution re- 
quired from Physical Science to round off and amplify the humanitarian 
conception of progress, should, for half a century, have been the most potent 
intellectual weapon against humanitarianism. This unfortunate result 
appears attributable to a confusion between different planes of thought. 
When evolutionists set themselves in earnest to find a meaning for such 
terms as “‘ higher and lower,” “‘ fit and unfit,’’ which come so readily to the 
lips, they cannot well avoid the appeal to a rational standard of ethics. 
With the introduction of such a standard there arises the possibility of 
distinguishing the processes which make for the evolution of a higher type 
from those which tend only to differentiation. The upward process, the 
* orthogenic line,”’ as it has elsewhere been called, being thus distinguished, 
it became possible to define its tendency as that which makes for the ad- 
vance of mind towards self-mastery. But this is again the self-conscious 
Spirit of Hegel, the self-directing Humanity of Comte. ; , 
It is very noteworthy that Mr. Kidd, starting from the biological point 
of view, has in his later work (Principles of Western Civilization) laid great 
stress on self-conscious development as the turning point in Evolution. 


596 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


differ primarily on this point. The Hegelian would hold that 
Absolute Self-Consciousness can be proved by a metaphysical 


demonstration to express the true character of the Absolute. 


Those who at all lean to Positivism would deny that such reality 


—< 


is in any way knowable, and would claim for their principle — 


merely that it formulated the results of experience and would 
prove a trustworthy guide of life. But the doctrine that the 


ultimate nature of reality is unknowable is itself a metaphysical — 


proposition which is open to question. It is equally possible to 
hold that all knowledge is, so far as it goes, knowledge of reality. 
On this view reality shows its character in experience, though in 
our limited experience it shows it only in part. If, then, the 
whole course of history, or say, rather, of physical, biological, and 
social evolution, is to be summed up in this—that it is a process 
wherein mind grows from the humblest of beginnings to an adult 
vigour, in which it can—as in the creed of humanity it does— 
conceive the idea of directing its own course, mastering the 
conditions external and internal of its exercise, if this is a true 
account of evolution—and it is the account to which positive 
science points—then we cannot say that this is a mean and 
unimportant feature of reality that is disclosed to us. We can 
hardly suppose such a process accidental or quite peculiar to 
the conditions of this earth. At any rate, as far as the widest 
synthesis of our experience goes, it shows us Reality neither 


as a providentially ruled order nor as a process of fortuitous © 


combinations and dissolutions, but as the movement towards 
self-realization of a mind appearing under rigidly limited con- 
ditions of physical organization in countless organisms, and 
arriving for the first time at a partial unity in the consciousness 
of a common humanity with a common aim. 


8. To enter more fully into the questions of historical fact and 
philosophic interpretation raised by the humanitarian theory 
would be beyond our present scope. But on the ethical question 
which it suggests a word should be said. To begin with, we may 


remark that as a standard of action the conception of human — 


development requires some further definition. A Utilitarian in 


particular might ask whether it is any and every sort of develop- 
ment that we seek, or only such development as leads to happi- 


ness. If the former, he will contend that our standard is bad; © 
if the latter, he will maintain that we are, after all, Utilitarians, — 
taking pleasure as an ultimate end, though we may call a 


scientific view of the collective life of Humanity our means to 


that end. By introducing the idea of historical growth we have — 


MODERN ETHICS 597 


not, after all, evaded the philosophic problem. How moral ideas 
have arisen and grown is one question, how and by what prin- 
ciple we, as conscious and reflective beings, ought to shape 
them, is another. We must therefore revert to the question 
raised by the Utilitarians, and ask how the standard they propose 
looks in the light of the further developments of thought which 
have been traced. 

The Utilitarian theory, we saw, rested principally on an 
analysis of Desire. Now in the controversies to which this 
analysis has given rise, two opposite fallacies have been revealed. 
On the one hand, pleasure has been taken as the direct and 
universal end of action. On the other, those who have refused 
to identify pleasure and the good, have denied all relation 
between them, or have reduced pleasure to the position of a 
result supervening on the attainment of desire. Now, inasmuch 
as pleasure is distinct from happiness, this latter position has a 
justification of its own, but this has hardly been the point of 
the controversy... When we have distinguished Will and Happi- 
ness as having to do with the permanent elements of well- 


1 To resolve happiness into pleasure was the initial mistake of the Utili- 
tarians. In part it proceeded from the influence of the Humian meta- 
physics, which denied permanent “‘ substantiality ”’ to the ego and resolved 
it into a series of states. Such an ego could only have a series of feelings, 
and to such temporary feelings the name of pleasure and pain are appropri- 
ate. But at bottom, I think, it proceeded from a laudable desire to define 
@ man’s happiness as something strictly pertaining to his own conscious 
existence. Without such a strict definition the fundamental question of 
modern ethics is not fairly faced. For the man who sacrifices happiness 
to duty admittedly “ does well,” and from this it is easy to proceed to 
the proposition that “itis well with him,” and that he is accordingly a 
‘“‘happy’’man. In that way of putting the argument (which has nothing 
to do with the empirical fact that by abandoning apparent happiness a 
man may obtain real inward peace, which is conscious happiness in another 
form) the old ambiguity between happiness as something felt and happiness 
as the possession of admirable qualities is revived, and the question whether 
the one should be given up for the other is blurred. The Utilitarians 
deserve more credit than they have received for forcing a clear statement 
of the question by resolutely defining happiness in terms of feeling. On 
the other hand, if the self is more than a series of fleeting states, happiness 
is more than a succession of pleasurable feelings. If the self is the per- 
manent constitution or psychical fabric which is the subject of experi- 
ence, happiness is the relatively stable condition of the structure—the 
quality which tinges ordinary life and lends it a roseate hue, which makes 
pleasure joy and pain bearable. I say relatively stable, because though in 
a measure dependent on our own personality—so that some have a happy, 
others an unhappy temperament—it is capable of being temporarily or even 
permanently destroyed by the really great events of life—some one’s death, 
or the ruin of a cherished hope. It is oixeidy 7: in that it belongs to our 
personality, and dSuvcadaiperdy in that no light thing robs us of it. But 
under the misfortunes of a Priam the most that can be said is “‘ diaAdure; 
Td KaAdy.”’ 


598 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


being from desire and pleasure as concerned with the temporary, 
the same question arises in a new form. Is personal Happiness 
the direct object of Will, or do we choose a certain mode of life 
from merits of its own, and merely find happiness in the fact 
that we are able to realize the result of efforts ? 
, There is a third alternative which seems to accord best 
’ with the analysis of effort and to be supported by comparative 
psychology. In speaking of pleasure we are apt to forget in 
English the Greek distinction between 76 760 and 7 7dov7, the 
pleasant object or action, and the pleasure which we feel in 
relation to the object or in performing the action. The normally 
constituted animal on the whole desires things that are pleasant. 
Were it otherwise, pleasure and pain would have no func- 
tion. For they come into existence by serving the function of 
regulating impulse, encouraging one impulse, and modifying or 
inhibiting another. The impulse to eat nasty food is checked 
by its nastiness, the preference for pleasant food is encouraged 
by its pleasantness. Indeed, in the life of the lower animals all 
that we know by direct observation is the encouragement and 
the inhibition, and the permanent effects thereof. ‘The pleasure 
and the pain we impute to the animal on the analogy of our 
own consciousness. The value of this machinery for the regu- 
lation of impulse is that it enables the hereditary structure to 
become more elastic. The animal which can learn by pleasure 
and pain may have impulses which would lead to its destruction 
if not checked by the painful results, but for this very reason 
it is not compelled to come into being with all its modes of 
behaviour preordained, but may safely possess a richer inherit- 
ance, enabling it to deal with wider variations of circumstances. 
The implication here is that the pleasurable on the whole coin- 
cides with the life-giving, and the unpleasant with the harmful. 
Impulse, then, is on the whole regulated by pleasure, and 
pleasure is on the whole subservient to the needs of life. But 
(1) impulse is the primary fact. It is not based on pleasure but 
confirmed or modified by it, and the same thing is true of Desire, 
which is impulse shaped and directed by the idea of its object. 
The desired object is attractive, and the attraction is not essenti- 
ally a faint anticipatory realization of the pleasure to be derived 
from it, but a feeling-tone attaching to the idea itself and giving 
it driving-force. (2) The adaptation of desire to pleasure, 
and of pleasure to life-giving or, as we may call them, develop- 
mental ends, is never perfect. Human, and even animal, nature 
is many sided, and a function which on the whole tends to pre-* 
serve the stock may have many harmful developments which 


MODERN ETHICS 599 


natural selection fails to lop off. Thus the pleasure of eating 
and drinking, which on the whole is necessary, may stimulate 
' Over-eating and over-drinking, which are pro tanto harmful. 
Further, different impulses and different pleasures may conflict 
with one another, and those which are on the whole most 
necessary to the life of the species may be thwarted by others 
felt with greater immediate intensity. 

While Desires are many, various, and passing, they belong to a 
self which is single and permanent and which may act as a unity 
for ends which appeal to it as such. This action, which we call 
that of Will, implies a certain inter-relation of the various im- 
pulsive and emotional tendencies, which are naturally fostered 
and strengthened so far as they fall in with the ends which the 
Will adopts, pressed and re-moulded to adapt them to the course 
of life which it prescribes, or it may be altogether resisted and, if 
possible, suppressed. In so far as the ends adopted respond to 
the main impulses of the individual, giving scope, for example, to 
his emotional needs or intellectual power, it satisfies, and pro- 
vides the substance of Happiness, while internal conflict and still 
more the anarchy resulting from the loss of any unifying object 
are felt as unhappiness and misery. But here again the object 
is not chosen as a means to happiness, but valued as an end, and 
the same quality that makes it valued makes of the experiences 
active and passive which it yields, a life in living which we feel 
happy. Happiness and Will are thus in a relation analogous 
to that of Pleasure and Desire. Happiness in the experience 
of the life chosen confirms and strengthens the line of choice. 
Misery, discord, and the sense of unfulfilment inhibit action, and 
tend, if all too slowly, to re-shape the course. 

What can be said in general terms of the objects which the 
will adopts? First, the conditions of evolution determining 
the genesis alike of Desire and Pleasure, and Will and Happi- 
ness, secure a rough and broad correlation of these driving and 
guiding forces of action with the vital needs of the race. This is 


1 The question of the relation between pleasure and desire, will and 
happiness, may be put in a simpler form by asking, e.g. whether the value 
of a given object consists in the pleasure derivable from it, so that if we 
imagine the pleasure removed the value would disappear also. If the 
answer is affirmative, the conclusion may be drawn that the thing itself 
is indifferent—merely a means to pleasure. If negative, that the pleasure 
is, as it were, adventitious and irrelevant. The true answer rather is that 
the pleasure we take in a thing is merely another expression for the value 
we attach to it. But the value is attached to the thing. Or if we prefer 
the phrase, the pleasure is in the thing, related to the thing, not a subsequent 
effect which the thing happens to produce and which might as well be 
produced by anything else. 


600 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


true of the springs of action from hunger to romantic love and 
from fear to a patriotic devotion. Thus in the raw material of 
instinct as rough-hewn by heredity there is a potentiality of 
harmony between impulse-feeling and the permanent require- 
ments of life, but there is also manifold opportunity for conflict 
and loss. Not only may one impulse clash with others, but the 
effort after self-control may take the form of stamping out 
capacities and so impoverishing life. Similarly in the relations 
of individuals and groups. The anarchic self-interest of each 
segment centred on that which makes for the preservation and 
expansion of its own stock is matched by the narrowing tenden- 
cies of repressive despotism. Between these poles rational ethics 
seeks the line of harmony. Instead of achieving unity by the 
repression of any given capacity, it seeks, if possible, to take it 
up, transmute it, and find for it a direction in which it may work 
with the rest, and in so doing it makes for a life which is fuller and 
more harmonious. Now if life is good—if, that is to say, it is 
the maintenance of the needs of the individual and the race which 
forms the groundwork of our aims and our emotional interests— 
then a fuller, wider, richer life is better, and the fullest, widest, 
richest life the best. But from the rational point of view, which 
contemplates the life of the race as a whole, any enrichment of 
life in one direction which is necessarily balanced by loss in 
another direction cannot on the whole be good. The race as a 
whole, life as a whole is its concern, and the fuller life which it 
seeks must therefore in its many-sided activities be in harmony 
with itself. The aim of rational ethics, then, is the harmonious 
development of the racial life, and this, stated in terms of feeling, 
is the same thing as general happiness, happiness being the sense 
of a full and harmonious life. 

This analysis of Desire and Will, Pleasure and Happiness has 
thus led us by another road to that conception of a synthesis or 
harmony of Action which we said above to be the postulate of a 
rational theory of moral obligation. As the supreme object of 
endeavour this furtherance of the collective life of humanity 
becomes the standard by which moral rules and social institutions 
are to be judged. This object includes all the partial aims of 
man, all his loves, joys, hopes, ambitions, tastes, his love of 
family and fatherland—all, so far as they do not antagonize one 
another but co-operate. Thus it rests on elements of feeling 
implicit from the first in the moral consciousness, but its full 
apprehension as that which gives meaning to all earlier develop- 
ment postulates in the collective mind a self-knowledge and self- 
guidance parallel to the self-consciousness of the individual. 


MODERN ETHICS 601 


Moral progress is the gradual conversion of the mind whereby 
this meaning becomes explicit, whereby its own unity becomes 
apparent to it, and the potentialities of its life and growth as a 
unity are grasped as the supreme object of endeavour, and the 
principle governing the rules of right and wrong. 

In essentials this principle is the distinctive achievement of 
the modern mind... It is true that in the central conception 
of harmony modern ethics is a return to the Greeks. But it 
returns charged with all the protest against human limita- 
tion, all the romance, the chivalry, the sense of infinitude which 
are incarnate in medizval and modern feeling. Now harmony 

implies order, measure and system. Divergent elements can be 
brought into a unity and made to co-operate only when each is 
fined and polished to fitin with its neighbour. Hence symmetry, 
balance, and in a sense limitation are the features which always 
impress usin the Greekideal. Itis, indeed, easy to over-emphasize 
a contrast which strikes every one onthe surface. Plato, after all, 
is the first great Romanticist with his insistence on Eros as the 
driving force even in the world of pure thought, with his Philo- 
sopher King who, holding fast to real Beauty and real Justice, 
moves in an Elysian region far above the turmoil of that poor 
mankind for whose sake he will yet descend as a ruler and 
guardian into their cave, with his just man sustained by that 
which makes him indifferent to the opinion of gods and men, 
who will meet an unjust death rather than break the laws which 
human government is mishandling to his hurt. Aristotle 
enshrines the same spirit in four words which thrill through his 
matter-of-fact acknowledgment of human weakness when he 
bids the thinker as far as may be “‘ put off his mortality.”’ The 
Stoic brings the wise man in direct relation to the supreme reason 
that controls all things, and sets the free life of the soul above 
the limits of all physical and social conditions. None the less, 
the ideal to which all alike aspire is that most clearly expressed 
by Aristotle as the perfection of a type which is in essence eternal 
and immutable in a universe whose process consists in the realiza- 
tion of a system of such typical forms, and the notion of type, 
even the notion of perfection involves that of something measur- 
able, defined, and in the last resort limited and statuesque. When 
we turn to medieval life, whether to its poetry or its action, 
to its religion or its chivalry, to its cloistered chastity or its 
romantic love, whether'to the dim vaults of its cathedrals or to 
the grotesques of their gargoyles or misereres, we are conscious 
_ of a wider and more untamable force, a breath from the Teutonic 
forest urging on to the unattainable and finding no joy in that 


602 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


which it can actually reach. We feel it the more keenly because 
it is confronted with a theory of subordination, an admission 
of human impotence and nothingness, an exaltation of divine 
majesty, and a negation of earthly life crushing with vast super- 
incumbent weight the forces of thought and imagination that 
have reared it. Every impulse of man is raised to its. highest 
power and is in its turn supreme. The love of God is spoken of 
in terms of romantic passion and the love of woman in terms of 
the worship of God. The least thought of the flesh is deadly and 
the knight is stirred to golden deeds of selfless chivalry by the 
glance of a woman’s eyes. The martyr bears utter ignominy 
without raising a hand in self-defence, and personal honour com- 
pels a man to wipe out the least fleck upon it in the blood of the 
assailant. Charity has nothing to do with that liberality which 
is the mean in the expenditure of money. It isto divide the last 
coat with the beggar and go forth in rags into the world. The 
sainted king must kiss the leper and wash the beggar’s feet, 
yet the powers that be are ordained of God, and their magnificence 
and state are proper adornments of the heads of that hierarchical 
order which is of divine institution. The pope is slave of the slaves 
of God, but yet is the summit of the earthly order, with power to 
bind and loose here and hereafter. At every point we are taken 
beyond what is actually or even possibly human. The require- 
ment that man sets upon himself is infinite—not the harmony of 
measured parts each rounded to perfection in itself, and as such 
filling its due place in order with the rest, but the measureless 
which this life cannot attain and which experience can only 
symbolize. But by the most tragic contradiction of all, the theory 
of the infinite, the system of salvation, is the one thing that is 
worked out to compact and finite form, and in the end to dull 
and deadly prose. The medieval scheme of divine government, 
with its frigid distinctions, its cold hierarchies of conceptions, its 
dismembering of truth, applies the Aristotelian logic to the 
establishment of an order more statical than that of its progenitor, 
and mechanical in its interpretation of nature and spirit where 
Aristotle had ever sought for an organic view. The implicit 
infinitude of the medizval mind broke upon the strong finitude 
of its theory. Modern thought, breaking away by successive 
wrenches from medizval discipline and urgent to found a theory 
of life which it can justify in reason, is still confronted by a very 
similar dilemma. The rational appeal is to the nature and 
experience of man, the rational impulse is to introduce harmony 


* Cf. on the whole of the above, Taylor, The Medieval Mind, esp. Book IT. 
chap. xiv.; Book III. chaps. xv., xvii., xxiii. ; Book VII. chap. xliv. 


MODERN ETHICS 603 


into effort and life, but in human nature itself lies the effort 
to transcend it, in human experience the questions that point 
beyond it, in the ethical impulse that makes for harmony qualities 
that brook no limitation and break up any established finite 
order. Hence, though social order is wider and in outer relations 
generally more tranquil, there is a deeper and more perpetual 
unrest and a swift, unceasing swing of thought. But though 
there is paradox here and a problem, there is no insuperable con- 
tradiction. Such order, intellectual or practical, as imperfect 
man can establish is never complete and all-embracing, but 
limited and provisional. It has to expand, and the rebellious 
elements are the ferment that maintain life and make for growth. 
But that element which is the spring of progress has a value which 
in the coolest rational assessment must stand high, and all the 
higher, in accordance with the strictest scientific calculus of 
demand and supply, for its variety. It is true that devotion 
to an impossible cause may waste much energy and break the 
life of the individual. But the spirit which sustains such devo- 
tion is the most vital thing in the world, and it is better that it 
should live and act unwisely than perish from not acting at all. 
The deeper issues are apt to be stirred only at certain points of 
concentrated interest, and at first blush there always seems some- 
thing irrational in preferring a single object to the whole order of 
normal life. But in reality, if we could start from one of these 
points of decision and deploy all the line of consequences upon 
the plane of ordinary experience, it would be found to cover 
ground enough in mere magnitude to justify the value which we 
place upon the issue. The theoretical problem of ethics is to 
effect this measure, and thus find place in a rational system for 
that which on an over-simplified view figures as irrational. Its 
practical problem is to find the real direction of these impulses 
and so convert them from wasting torrents to irrigating streams 
in human life. To do this is to make them aware of their origin 
in human needs and their functionin human emancipation. In 
this the modern spirit has so far succeeded as to transfer the 
devotion of the martyr and the fire of the prophet to causes 
more real and free from selfish alloy than that of personal salva- 
tion. It has spent them in no niggardly measure on the libera- 
tion of a nation, a class, or a sex, on the emancipation of the 
slave and the industrial toiler, on the healing of the sick, on 
the advancement of knowledge, the exploration of the earth, the 
conquest of material power. From the French movement of the 
mid-eighteenth century onwards it has thus in a manner united 
the enthusiasm of the Orient, the fighting spirit of the Crusader 


604 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


and the social rationalism of the Greek. For it has emphasized 
the claims of the individual, his rights, his conscience no less 
than his duties, and has often set the established order at naught 
if it has seemed to violate what is sacred to personality. Liberty 
and social service are the poles on which it turns, and to find the 
true meaning of the one and the end and method of the other is 
the task of social theory. The ethics that is to do justice to this 
liberating and yet constructive movement must aim not at a 
complete and static harmony but at one that moves and adapts 
itself to growth. Its model is not the completed circle, but 
rather the cycle of the foliage ending in the point which enfolds 
the leaf-buds of next spring. 

These changes affect the idea of harmony in what we may call 
its form. The whole sum of intervening experience since the 
days of the classical philosophers has also deepened and enlarged 
its content. ‘To formulate the character of changes so complex 
in any summary terms may well seem a hopeless task. At most 
we may hope to seize certain pivotal points on which develop- 
ment turns. The earlier Greek ethics of the fifth and fourth 
centuries achieved a reasoned ideal of personal character and 
social order in harmonious interaction. But its personal ideal 
was on the whole aristocratic and its social ideal statical and 
restricted by the limitations of the city state. The later moralists 
and, in particular, the Stoics, applying the law of nature as a 
living principle of criticism, expanded the conception of human 
brotherhood, made the individual—noble or base born, Greek or 
barbarian, bond or free—the master of his fate, and set forth the 
simpler elements of a world polity. But in the Stoic period free 
social organization is already giving way to centralized military 
empire, a constructive social scheme is ceasing to be possible, 
and the individual is, on the whole, left to grapple with his social 
surroundings as best he may. Still, the Stoic universalism 
prepared the way for the doctrine of salvation, which we may 
take as the pivot of the Christian ethics. Now, salvation is not 
merely open to all men who accept Christ. It is equally the 
duty of all Christians to secure the salvation of their brothers 
and sisters. Universalism thus acquires a new meaning. It is 
not merely that all have a certain minimum of rights, but that 
all owe to all a duty which touches the essentials of being. The 
missionary spirit, the work of practical redemption, takes a place 
which only a religion could give it. Itis the duty of each man 
not only to save himself, but his brother. In another way the 
universalist principle is richer in content, for the Christian sal- 
vation is not confined to the strong and wise, but is within the 


MODERN ETHICS 605 


reach of babes and sucklings, and the humblest soul has a value 
which is in a sense infinite, seeing that no gain elsewhere can 
replace its loss. There is here at bottom the most thorough- 
going doctrine of equality and the most comprehensive hope for 
all men ever preached, and this core of ethical religion remains, 
however woefully overlaid with the husks of sectarian narrow- 
ness and doctrinal strife. Yet, the doctrine of brotherhood 
and the missionary spirit notwithstanding, the Christian ethics 
remained at its centre individualist and supernaturalist. It is 
the individual soul that is to be saved, and its salvation is a 
preparation for another world. The distinctive note of modern 
ethics is the return to the social and the positive point of view. 
The salvation of every man and woman is still one pole of ethics, 
but it is one pole only. Salvation is to be within this life and 
for this life. It stands not only in the possession of the soul in 
complete self-mastery, but in an organic relation to a wider life 
—in its simplest form a personal relation to other individuals, 
in its wider and more complex forms an impersonal relation to 
the life of the community and the race. But salvation so con- 
ceived cannot be compassed by the individual alone or by mis- 
sionary effort to the individual as an individual. There must 
equally be a social salvation. Society has a soul to be saved, 
and its salvation is in the justice, humanity and freedom realized 
in its inward and outward relations. Only under such institu- 
tions and in response to such governing principles can the in- 
dividual find his right niche and do the work which is to make 
the best of himself and the best service to bis kind. The Greek 
harmony returns, but charged with deeper and richer content. 
It is not merely the harmony between the self-development of 
a wise and strong man and the requirements of a civic order 
which he, as one of the ruling class, helps to maintain. It is the 
wider and more difficult harmony between the claims of human 
nature in its infinite variety, in all its ascending and descending 
range of power and scope, to find expression and live its life, and 
a claim of the collective effort, itself hardly less variable and self- 
conflicting, towards the realization of great ends common to the 
race. ! The actual social order, including in that term the system 
of ethical and religious ideas along with the body of institutions, 
is of the nature of an experiment in the organization of life. Its 
value is relative on the one hand to the requirements of every 
individual soul within. its sway, on the other to the life of man- 
kind as a whole. To bring these two poles into relation is the 
problem of modern ethics. Thus, where the Greek sought a 
harmony between the self-development of the individual and the 


606 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


stability of the social order, the modern seeks a social order 
which shall reconcile the ultimate claims of every individual 
upon society with the claims of collective human progress upon 
each constituent social unit. Ancient ethics worked up to the 
doctrine of universal salvation with the warmth of brotherhood 
and, further, of missionary zeal which this implies. Modern 
ethics has restored to this doctrine the social and positive 
content which it lost ; and thus effects a synthesis of the Greek 
and the Christian teaching of social statesmanship and apostolic 
ardour. 

Finally, the positive conception of ethics in relation to the 
modern idea of development carries with it a penetrating 
change in the ethical point of view. Common sense evolves for 
itself a certain practical standard with which the thinker starts. 
That standard is at first his own, and to get from it to a reasoned 
system he has to view his own mental make-up from outside, 
to regard it as something due to determinate conditions, to find 
out what these conditions are, and to distinguish what is per- 
manent and necessary in their operation from that which is 
transitory or accidental. This is the relative standpoint, which 
is characteristic of modern thought and is essential to the full 
appreciation of development. 

Ancient thought, it is true, recognized a conventional element 
in established custom, and contrasted it with the natural, which 
is the same everywhere. But, to the modern, nature is itself a pro- 
cess and human nature a composite product—the very structure 
of our moral consciousness depending on anterior conditions. 
Now, if we are to attain an objective—that is, a rational— 
standard, we must lay bare these conditions. We must resolve 
the structural concepts which at first we take for granted—con- 
cepts such as self and others, good and bad, right and duty, with 
the experiences out of which and the thought processes by which 
they are built up. Starting from these elements we can thus re- 
cognize in the ethical code of mankind from the most primitive 
onwards, beginnings of a synthesis, incomplete and inconsistent, 
no doubt, yet, such as they are, the indispensable basis of social 
life. Through many failures and relapses, these beginnings are, on 
the whole, enlarged in response to the needs of a wider social life. 
This movement is referable, both in its origin and its advance, 
to those elements of thought and feeling which we have here 
gathered together under the name of practical rationality. 
Such rationality, co-operating in countless individuals through 
the generations, isa real bond of unityin mankind, and it is this 
unifying principle that has been called Humanity. Now, in 


MODERN ETHICS 607 


the culmination of ancient ethics man was to serve humanity as 
a community within the kosmos, but we might say rather that 
humanity is that—call it spiritual principle, organic unity or by 
whatever inadequate name we may—which works towards the 
realization of a kosmos that is as yet a very distant ideal, and 
not only are duties owed to it, but its needs prescribe what our 
duties are. Hence, though our argument has gone to show that 
our ethics are founded on deep-lying instincts, and though the 
humanitarian idea is held to be only the explicit recognition of a 
principle that was all along implied in the conscious moral judg- 
ments of mankind, yet the effect of this principle, once recognized, 
is a Copernican change of attitude. Hitherto human conduct 
has been conceived as bound by law—first by divine law, then by 
natural law. But if the humanitarian principle is correct, man 
is not made for the law, but the law for humanity. Instead of 
supernatural religion being the basis of ethics, ethics becomes 
the test to which such religion must submit. The relative value 
of the creeds is measured by their ethical efficacy, and the ethical 
consciousness is seen to be the only firm point of departure for 
any attempt at a spiritual interpretation of nature. As with 
religions, so with social institutions. Property, contract, mar- 
riage, the position of women, class distinctions, political obliga- 
tions, the right of warfare and of conquest—all these in olden 
days were founded on custom and supported by divine authority. 
Whoso would seek the good of society must work within the 
limits thus rigidly laid down by the moral or the religious 
tradition. When revolts against these limitations occurred, they 
took the form of appeals to expediency, or perhaps of a sweep- 
ing denial of moral obligation, or, again, of the assertion of some 
counter principle of no greater claims than that which was called 
in question. In a rationalistic system of morals the whole point 
of view is changed. These institutions have grown up in rough 
accordance with the circumstances of social life, but they have 
no value or validity except in so far as they subserve human needs. 
On the other hand, they are not to be set aside on particular 
occasions when they happen to be inconvenient, as the doctrine 
of expediency suggests, not only because in the long run nothing 
is so inexpedient as the practice of unsettling society, but also 
because the rights and duties recognized by the ordinary con- 
sciousness when viewed genetically are seen to have arisen in 
response to social needs, and to contain elements, however 
roughly put, of ethical truth. They are like the empirical 
generalizations of common sense which contain truth, though 
not accurately true as they stand, and historically speaking they 


608 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


are seen to develop, to expand, define themselves, deepen and 
purify their meaning as ethical thought has developed. Thus 
they lie ready to hand as a basis for a scientific sociology. 
Sociology, therefore, is not compelled to start from an empty 
slate and consider what in each case would promote the greatest 
happiness of the greatest number. It has rather to take the 
institutions it finds, and aim at a scientific determination of the 
function which they fill in the life of humanity.1. Take the case 
of private property, for example. Here is an institution which 
from one point of view may be regarded as the only method of 
securing to the workman the fruits of his toil. Under suitable 
conditions it may in reality have that effect. Under other 
conditions it may as easily become the means of excluding the 
great mass of the people from the means of earning an indepen- 
dent livelihood. When the right of property is made absolute, 
whether as right natural or right divine, there is no ethical means 
of discriminating between the two cases. All the wealth of the 
country might fall into a single hand, as in Mr. Wells’s romance, 
yet if it were in the bond, society could do nothing but submit. 
Rights pushed to this point are answered by rebellion, and are 
therefore justly stigmatized by Bentham as anarchical fallacies. 
They provoke the doctrine of pure expediency, which denies that 
there is any right but the welfare of society, and forgets that it 
is essential to the welfare of society that the obligations and 
expectations of its members should be defined and secured. The 
rationalist criticism of property would have to meet all these 
points. It would have to discuss the functions which the in- 
stitution of property performs, and so define it as to secure that 
it should perform those functions and obstruct no other useful 
organ of the social structure. It could not be satisfied with 
upsetting generally recognized rights wherever they happen to 
be inconvenient, nor with the permanent maintenance of rights 
which can be shown to entail a balance of evil consequences. 
It would have to take the institution of property and examine 
it in all its developments and ramifications, to consider in- 
heritance and bequest, the nature of exchange and the resulting 

1 The great historical example of this method is, of course, the work of 
Bentham. For anestimate of the reforms achieved under his influence, see 
Dicey, Law and Opinion in England, pp. 183-209. Professor Dicey, in 
whom after many years Bentham at length finds a fair judge, does not 
ignore the limitations of the Utilitarian basis. These, in fact, were such 
as to render sure going possible only so far as the means to the general 
happiness were matter of obvious common sense. For the more complex 
problems—economical, social, religious, political—of the modern world a 


scientific sociology is needed, and the need is even more urgent than in 
Bentham’s time. 


MODERN ETHICS 609 


distribution of wealth under the conditions of modern industry, 
the effects of monopoly and the growth of values arising from 
the increase of population, the morality of acquiring wealth 
from occupations injurious to the people at large—these and 
countless other details have to come up for judgment in a scien- 
tific reconstruction of the nature and measure of the rights of 
property which a rational scheme of ethics would recognize as 
suitable to be maintained in the permanent interests of society. 


9. Such a reconstruction is not the work of a day—and 
in social development, be it remembered, a hundred years are 
but as yesterday. If we would know the fruits which ethical 
rationalism has borne we must seek them, not in the work of any 
one school which has apprehended the principle in all its fulness 
—for no such finality is as yet, if it is ever, possible—but scattered 
in the work of different and often opposing schools, in which 
the principle has been apprehended partially or under different 
aspects. Indeed, the influence of the humanitarian spirit in the 
modern world has been far wider than that of all the schools 
which could be called distinctively humanitarian... For where 
there are few who will agree that human ethics form the root 
from which all true knowledge of religion springs, there are many 
who will admit that the relation between religion and ethics has 
been in a manner reversed in the modern world, so that whereas 
ethics was formerly based on religion, religion is now deemed to 
have its firmest root in ethics. Many, again, who would doubt 
or reject the conclusions reached above as to the ultimate basis 
of obligation, would yet admit that humanitarian ethics, whether 
acting directly or through a revivified religious consciousness, 
has had a large share in the distinctive changes that have made 
the modern state and the civilization of the modern world. In 
this broader sense humanitarianism has, in fact, touched every 
department of practical morals—class and racial divisions, the 
position of women, the law of marriage, the criminal law, the 


1 Still more obviously is it wider than any school or schools of Philosophy. 
The distinctive ideas of the modern mind have expressed themselves in a 
thousand ways, in lyric poetry and in music, in fiction and the drama, as 
well as in avowed political and sociological or religious discussion. In 
particular, the contrast between the realities of human nature and the con- 
ventional assumption of traditional ethics has been handled with more 
boldness and far more wealth of detail by the novelist and the dramatist 
than by the professed philosopher. If in the text I have confined myself 
to philosophy, it is because here the movement of thought receives, not 
indeed its fullest expression, but its most exact analysis, and is therefore 
presented in the form most easily comparable with the thought of earlier 
stages. , 

RR 


610 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


law of war, the rights and duties of states, the claims of 
nationality, the right of property, the law of contract, the rights 
of association and of citizenship, the equality of religions. We 
find the humanitarian spirit in that re-casting of values which 
makes the infliction of misery on mankind a sin not to be erased 
by any access of national glory. We find it in the heightened 
sympathies which begin to make cruelty a crime, and in the 
calmer insight into human nature which banishes the use of 
cruelty in the repression of crime. We find it in the heightened 
belief in the power of reason which suggests that in the end 
rational suasion and just treatment are better methods of leading 
men to see what is good for them than the shorter and sharper ex- 
pedients of the drill sergeant, that freedom to advocate error is the 
best social safeguard for truth, and to rule by the consent of the 
governed the surest.road to social stability. Humanitarianism, 
indeed, has justified the Christian ethics on its positive side. As 
against those who maintained that the Sermon on the Mount had 
only an ideal meaning applicable to a better world, it has vindi- 
cated the practical application of the Beatitudes to this world of 
ours. It has shown that when we look at matters from the point 
of view of common humanity it is true that there is none so 
lowly but he must be considered equally with the noblest, that 
the spirit of mild equity is better even in the interests of order 
than that of harshness, that it is a hard fact that hatred does not 
cease by hatred but by love, that the fundamental remedy for 
evil and for error is not physical force but spiritual regeneration. 
In a similar spirit it has been able to show that in industry it 
is not the hard master but the liberal employer who practises 
the best economy, that from the mere point of view of the output 
free labour is better than slavery, and highly organized labour 
than that of the sweater’s den; that in politics self-government 
is a better preservative of union than a centralized despotism, 
and that order is best maintained when those who have to obey 
share in the framing of the rules. In a word, it has not only 
reconstructed ethics, but it has shown that the ethical is valid— 
that it works as a force to be reckoned with in human affairs. 
But with no less emphasis ethical rationalism has insisted on 
that active development of human qualities which supernatural 
religions have too often ignored. It has justified individuals, 
classes, creeds, nationalities, that have stood resolutely by their 
rights and fought for their liberties. It has fostered the newer 
_ education of the faculties and ridiculed the sentimentalism which 
regarded all independent initiative in one half of the race as a 
kind of indecency. In short, it has conceived the permanent 


MODERN ETHICS 611 


elevation of both sexes and all classes to a life in which they 
could enjoy that free and full cultivation of their powers, which 
the best of the older civilizations only imagined to be possible 
for a narrow class. 

Of the future of rationalism it is not our business to speak. 
We are not concerned with prophecy, but with the analysis of 
past and present tendencies. But one common misconception 
has, I hope, been avoided in the account here given. There is a 
tendency to think of any “‘rational”’ system as claiming a certain 
finality, as forming as it were a closed circle from which the world 
of imagination is quite shut out. Nothing could be further from 
the true spirit of reason, which insists as a first principle on the 
relativity of all human conceptions, on the narrowness of the 
area reclaimed by knowledge as compared with the ocean of 
reality, and on the unlimited power of human capacity to expand 
and explore. Nothing is more certain, if the rationalist doctrine 
is true, than that doctrine itself will grow, and, as growth implies, 
will change. But, precisely because such changes are to be ex- 
pected, any attempt to define their outcome must be valueless. 
The rational ideal must be an ideal of growth that can accept 
change, and as it were assimilate it. We may hold the expan- 
sion of human faculty, the perfecting of social unity, the as- 
cendency of mind over the conditions of nature and its own 
existence, for formulas which in different words express im- 
perfectly, but in the best way at present attainable, the supreme 
end in which all human interests are summed up. But whither 
this expansion, this growing sovereignty will lead us, is a question 
to which we can return no certain answer. We stand on the 
edge of illimitable, unexplored regions, into which our vision 
penetrates but a little way. But at least we can dismiss as 
foolish the fear that science will exhaust the interest of reality, 
or peace destroy the excitement of life, or the reign of reason 
crampimagination. The conquests of mind have a very different 
effect. The more territory that it brings under its sway, the 
vaster the unconquered world looms beyond. 


Norr.—This chapter has been revised at a time when the humanitarian 
ethics is under eclipse, and in re-publishing it the writer is aware that he lays 
himself open to a criticism and a question. The criticism would be that he 
has given no space to the rival which for the time being has gained the upper 
hand, the principle of forcible self-assertion in its various forms. The 
types of thought which radiate from this conception as a centre certainly 
deserve close analysis, but this analysis would belong rather to a work on 
ethical theory and its applications than to one concerned with the main 
outlines of ethical development. A doctrine which the writer regards not 
as ethical but as anti-ethical could only come within his scope if he were 
to follow out every branch and side-track of misdirected thinking, which 


612 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


is foreign to his purpose. But at this point the question may be raised 
whether the doctrine of super-morality—the indifference of the strong 
man or of the strong government to the claims of personality or the rights 
of other people—does not really express the main tendency of the modern 
mind. Humanitarianism, it may be held, was a temporary product of the 
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The movement which set in with 
full vigour after 1870 is conceived by the humanitarian as a reaction, but 
has the twentieth century and the future with it. To that we may reply 
that it may have the future with it—that no one can foretell—but it will 
not be a future of civilization. It may be that the humanitarian spirit is 
not yet strong and coherent enough to establish itself, that its partial and 
qualified successes represent a culminating point in civilization, and that 
the world will have to undergo another period of re-barbarization before 
it pulls itself together for a more enduring effort. But prediction in 
sociology is a fond thing vainly invented. We set out at the beginning to 
analyze and compare stages of ethical development, and of these the highest 
and most distinctive of the modern mind, whatever its influence or its 
future fate may be, is, I would still contend, humanitarianism. 


CHAPTER VIII 
THE LINE OF ETHICAL DEVELOPMENT 


1. ETuics as treated in the present work is the study of the 
regulation of life. This regulation, as we saw in chapter i., 
begins in the animal world. We find it, indeed, in the lowest 
grades of life. For while at this level intelligence, in the sense of 
the purposeful use of the animals’ own experience, plays a small, 
perhaps at the bottom of all, a vanishing part of the matter, 
action is det by methods of re- 


sponse to stimulus (internal or external) which are fixed by the 
structure inherited b h individual from its ancestors. There 
is every probability that these methods, which display a general, 
though by no means perfect, adjustment to the requirements 
of the organism are in an indirect sense actually determined 
by those requirements. In every generation individuals which 
gave the responses best suited to preserve themselves and bring 
offspring into the world would probably survive in the largest 
numbers, and by the constant repetition of this process structures, 
fixedly determining the most suitable response to each kind of 
stimulus, would arise and be handed on. In this exceedingly 
slow, cumbrous and roundabout method, some of the experiences 
of the past generation (those, namely, which directly affect life, 
death, and reproduction) determine the behaviour of the present 
generation, and so determine it as to aid in assuring the future 
maintenance of the race. Thus, from the lowest organic grades 
upwards we have a rough correlation of the past, present and 
future experience of the species. 

The simplest responses so determined are, as we saw, of the 
Reflex type. These proceed with an almost unvarying mechani- 
cal sameness, with little, if any, adaptability to varying needs. 
But at a slightly higher stage there appear, Instincts. which, 
though they are generically inherited modes of response with 
essentially the same history and function, are more elastic in 
their operation and admit, as they expand, of correction by 
experience and modification according to varying requirements. 
Such instincts, as has been remarked, are not confined in their 
function to the service of the individual. They are directed to 

613 


614 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


the production of the young as well as to the maintenance of 
the life of the parent. At a fairly low level they are directed, 
further, to the preservation of the young when produced. At 
first very rudimentary, parental care assumes more and more 
importance as we ascend the scale and as intelligence arises to 


assist it, but there is no reason to doubt that its basis is through- 


out instinctive. That instincts of this kind should arise in the 
animal world might, indeed, be expected from the operation of 
those conditions under which instinct has grown up. What we 
have supposed is that certain stocks have survived in prepon- 
derating proportion in so far as the behaviour of their members 
was well adapted for the maintenance of the stock, and the pro- 
duction and care for the young by each individual or each pair 
would be as important an element in this process as the preser- 
vation of each individual itself. Thus biology does not lead us 
to assume an original egoism or self-regard out of which altruism 
is evolved as a secondary result. Egoism is something at once 
too deliberate and too limited to be primitive. What we infer 
alike from biological principles and from observed facts is rather 
an unreflective, possibly a quite unconscious, impulse growing 
by heredity into a determinate instinct producing responses 
adapted to the maintenance of the stock by means of the 
maintenance of the life of the agent and its young. 

In the lowest stages there is no reason to think that instinctive 
actions are accompanied by any sense even of the proximate 
end which they are adopted to secure. Not only so, but there 
are definite reasons for thinking the contrary. Such blind 
action we call generically Impulse. But.far down in the animal 
scale we found cases in which impulses are arrested by pain or 
encouraged by pleasure. These introduced us to a new feature 
in the conditions affecting behaviour. The act_of the ind+vidual 


is now no longer guided by the inheri ure, but, in these 
cases, by th ; erience as 
well. The inherited structure is affected by experience, and the 
‘Teactions which it will give are Yé-modelle ordingly, with the 


result that they are better adapted to securing an immediate 


benefit to the animal in the shape of a satisfaction obtained 
or a pain avoided. 

It would be premature to call this modification of behaviour 
intelligent. But, still within the animal world and on the plane 
of instinct, we get a higher adaptation. We find actions which 
.are modified, not because they are felt as pleasurable or painful, 
but because they produce pleasure or pain in the sequel. That 
is, the act and its consequences are distinct for the animal; and 


THE LINE OF ETHICAL DEVELOPMENT 615 


the relation between them seems to be intelligently rather than 
mechanically established in its mind, since e. g. an animal which 
has been punished for some darling sin will restrain himself 
under circumstances which might lead to detection, and enjoy 
himself when he feels secure. Here, as we find that action is 
successfully varied according as it does or does not produce a 
given effect, we may say that the relation of the act to the 
effect, that is the purpose, is the determining factor. Impulse 
so modified. becomes Desire.and Aversion. On the other hand, 
though we should say that it is desire for things that are 
pleasant (ra 75a) rather than for pleasure (Ad0v7), it is still 
pleasure (and pain) that are the moderators of desire. 

But the same intelligence which transforms impulse into 
desire renders possible the concrete apprehension of other 
individuals. To the higher animal, its master, its young, its 
friends, and its enemies are known apparently with some 
measure of individual recognition, and, moreover, their be- 
haviour, what they do, what they express, and what is done to 
them, are often matters. of lively concern. Hence, though we 
can no more see inside a dog’s mind than inside that of another 
human creature, we attribute sympathy to the one as to the 
other, and if we allow the dog intelligent purpose in securing 
his own pleasure and avoiding his own pain, we must by the 
same reasoning treat as purposeful what he does for another 
creature, human or animal. So we may attribute, not merely 
the gregarious instinct, but also the rudiments of a social inter- 
course to the higher animals, and hold that their actions are 
adapted, not only by instinct, but also in some measure by 
conscious intelligence to the protection, relief, or satisfaction 
of those for whom they feel affection. Thus we now find a 
considerable enlargement of the sphere of intelligence. We find 


it aiding in the adaptation of actions not only to the immediate, 


but to the somewhat more remote satisfaction of the agent, and 
also to the satisfaction of others whom the agent loves, But 
in all this it must be remembered that the inherited psycho- 
physical structure is the underlying condition. It is that which 
makes experience pleasant or painful, and it is this, for the most 
part, which renders possible and also limits the circle of affection." 


The main lines of behaviour, social as well as self-regarding, are 


1 I mean, e. g. that though a mother cat may tend a kitten intelligently 
at times, yet the basis of mother love is instinctive. At this stage “ natural 
selection ’ would even combat a wider love, since it would interfere with 
the predominance of any given stock which indulged it. So the conditions 
of race maintenance appear both as positive and negative determinants of 
social feeling. 


616 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


laid down by inherited structure in accordance withthe con- 
ditions of race maintenance. Only variations within these lines 
are left to the play of intelligence. Nevertheless, this: play 
increases the adaptability of the individual, enlarges the part 
which it plays in the world, and enables it to maintain the 
stock with a smaller number of descendants and with less waste 
of life. 


2. While animal purposes, in the strict sense of the term, 
appear to be limited to the concrete results of each particular 
action, and, so far as directed to the good of another, to be 
swayed wholly by feeling, in man we saw that the rise of 
general conceptions—a process which may be regarded as at 
once the effect and the cause of the growth of language—en- 
larges the scope of purpose and renders possible the laying 
down of fixed rules by which action is judged and the handing 
on of these rules by tradition. Forming a concept of himself as 
a permanent being with varied interests, of his wife or children, 
his social group, etc., in the same manner, man re-acts to these 
larger interests just as the animal does to the immediate 
stimulus of desire. This re-action to larger purpose we have 
called Will; distinguishing it from Desire, because in it the 
whole personality tends to be involved rather than a single 
sense or a single emotion, and because its object is not that 
which gives pleasure, but those larger vital issues in “which 
the more stable conditions of happiness are found. But the 
will does not set to work to construct its ends in a kind of © 
vacuum of the pure reason. It finds itself guided and lmited 
from the first by rules containing the traditions of society, and 
forming a standard by which the conduct of each man will be 
judged. These rules embody a tradition, the origin of which is 
for primitive man himself lost in myths. We do not, and 
probably never shall know in detail the actual stages by which 
the earliest customs originated. On the other hand, we do 
know something of the conditions by which custom in general 
is maintained and of the forces by which it is modified. We 
know, for instance, how customs change and grow and disappear 
unconsciously as an individual stretches a point here or makes 
a new application of a precedent there. We can see how the 
interaction of multitudinous forces transmutes custom and 
produces a new tradition before any one has been aware of the 
change, and we have no difficulty in conceiving the original 
growth of custom out of the inherited impulses of gregarious 
man as proceeding along the same general lines. It needs but 


THE LINE OF ETHICAL DEVELOPMENT _ 617 


that these impulses should be formulated and generalized, and 
there is already custom in germ, and the growth of custom _will 
be of the highest_value to_nascent-seciety—as-enabling_men to 
understand _each_other, i.e. to know what in given circum- 
stances each may expect from the other. The lines on which 
custom is formed wil however, be determined in each society 
“by no reasoned principle, but by the pressures, the thousand 
interactions of those forces of individual character and social 
relationship which never cease re-moulding what they have 
made—men’s loves and hates, their hopes and fears for them- 
selves and for their children, their dread of unseen agencies, 
their jealousies, their resentments, their antipathies, their 
sociability and dim sense of mutual dependence — all their 
qualities, good and bad, selfish and sympathetic, social and anti- 
social. We were able, however, on general grounds to lay down 
two limits within which from the first custom must move. 
First, it must bear_some relation to the character of primitive 
man. That is to say, although custom doubtless imposes upon 
him many restraints, nevertheless those restraints in the main 
fall into line with his own fears, reluctances, sympathies, and 
antipathies, and do not deviate from them to the snapping-point. 
For if this point is frequently reached, not merely in exceptional 
individuals, but in the average member of the tribe, there must 
either be a change of custom or anarchy. This limitation will 
cut both ways, will equally prevent the level of social tradition 
from rising above or from falling below the level which in this 
rough manner corresponds to primitive character. The rule 
of conduct must in effect be so far adapted to the nature of 
primitive man as to embody much of what is bad in him along 
with much of what is good—his limited sociability, his hatred 
and dread of strangers, his craven fear of the unknown. Evil 
and anti-social impulses, in fact, contribute to the first formation 
of the moral consciousness, along with affections and sympathies 
and the dimly felt need of co-operation. . 

In the second place, the body of custom must upon the whole 
be sui iti ich-make-forthe-meainterance of 
society, since otherwise the society would not be found in being 
caeny length of time. But once again, the beneficent efficacy 
of these conditions must not be exaggerated. In the first place, 
particular customs may be injurious provided they are not 
fatal. They may be the consequences of some idea which upon 
the whole makes for good order. Thus the taboo may be useful 
for the preservation of property. It may, however, have many 
useless or harmful applications. Further, when we speak of 





618 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


customs suited to the maintenance of society, we really mean 
the maintenance of a given social type. A custom which is 
quite necessary at one stage may block the advance to a higher 
stage, and if conditions are arising which make that advance 
possible, society will gain by its removal. The fact that custom 
rests on the requirements of social life does not render it inviolable 
in cases where those requirements have altered. However, 
when all these limitations are allowed for, it remains that without 
any reasoned conception of social welfare the broad conditions 
of stock preservation indirectly determine the main lines of 
conduct just as they do in the animal world, only those con- 
ditions no longer operate merely by fashioning the physical 
structure of the organism. They operate also through social 
tradition, and thereby once again are rendered more elastic, 
and are able to shape action over a wider sphere. The starting- 
point, then, for the development of human ethics is custom 
arising and maintaining itself, not through any reflective thought 
as to what is best, but by the play of human impulses within 
the limits of a life lived in social groups. 


3. From primitive custom as our starting-point, we can con- 
ceive ethical development as proceeding along three different 
lines. We may conceive it as an evolution in ethical concep- 
tions, in the character of human beings, or in the established 
relations of society. To consider first the movement of ethical 
conceptions, we have found it closely bound up with the develop- 
ment of thought in general, of ideas as to the nature and origin 
of things and the destinies of man. Now the evolution of 
thought, stated in general terms, consists on the one hand in 
growing precision or accuracy of analysis, on the other hand 
in the ever extending reach or grasp of experience, the result 
being a more and more articulate understanding of an ever 
larger segment of reality. In this development we may dis- 
tinguish certain phases, though we should regard them rather 
as milestones that mark the advance in a single journey than 
/ as gaps parting distinct stages from one another. Bearing 

this caution in mind, we_may briefly recapitulate what the 
previgus chapters _haxe shown. In the lowest stages of human 
thought, then, we have seen reason to think that the difficulty 
of forming any conceptions at all is such that the familiar 
_ categories of common experience are not fully distinguished. 
_ Attributes and relations become substances, while distinct 
| individuals melt away into one another and preserve no clear- 
. cut identity. There is no sound basis of generalization, no 


THE LINE OF ETHICAL DEVELOPMENT 619 


methodical interconnection of ideas, and no adequate distinction 
between the imaginary and the real, or between make-believe 
and earnest. Inferences are formed by unconscious assimilation, 
~ by fusion or confusion of ideas, and by the influence of emotional 
prepossessions. Distinctions that are most elementary in the 
structure of knowledge are quite insufficiently grasped, and the 
result is seen in magic, witchcraft, and the primitive doctrine 
of the quasi-material spirit. It is a great step forward when 
the world of ideas begins to be purged of these confusions, and 
thought no longer blurs and obliterates the primary lines of 
distinction, the common categories into which experience falls. 
Persons now are persons, functions are functions, relations 
are relations. Concrete experience is reflected with sufficient 
distinctness in mental pictures or images, and the thought- 
world, instead of being a distorted and confused rendering of 
the world of sense, is rather its counterpart and duplicate. 
The gods at this stage form a second human community in 
another sphere. Pure fancy, or fancy guided by crude ideas — 
of physical causation, plays freely round them and gives them a 
living personality, often a really concrete character, with family, 
social and political relationships, loves, hates, joys and sorrows, 
and complete life histories. Progress from the inarticulate to 
the concrete idea is thus reflected in the transition from spirits 
(and occult forces) to gods. 

Now the gods are already not only human, but in varying 
degrees superhuman. They preside over great departments of 
nature or of human life, thus embodying a wider and more dis- 
criminating colligation of experience. But, further, they often 
show traces of idealization, and in this we get a hint that the 
world of ideas is destined to be something more than a mere 
re-duplication of sense experience. This brings us to the next 
step in advance, wherein image-making develops into thinking. 
The ‘‘ picture ’’ ideas, loosely defined and uncritically connected, 
are transformed into definite or “‘abstract ’’ conceptions; the 
‘general ’’ notion vaguely applied into the universal, which, 

wherever used, has one constant meaning. Such concepts, of 
_ which those of number and quantity, and of Spatial and Temporal 
_ order, are probably the first to arise, are connected, developed 
and tested by systematic methods of analysis and synthesis— 
the concept once rendered exact being capable of methodical 
comparison with other concepts. 

But beside the minor “‘ departmental ”’ conceptions which give 
rise to special sciences or to methodical arts, the fundamental 
all-embracing categories of experience also enter at length into 





620 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


clear consciousness. The mind had learnt in its image-making 
to represent Persons and Attributes, Relations and Functions, 
and to keep them distinct. It now learns to recognize what it 
is that distinguishes them, and so to form conceptions of Person- 
ality, Attribute, Relation, Function. In so doing, it has grasped 
and. set before itself as distinct objects of thought the structural 
principles of its world. It is now in a position to attempt 
a theory of reality as a whole, to deal with the problems of 
permanence and change, of reality and appearance, of the finite 
and the infinite, and all the other antinomies which present 
themselves as soon as a serious effort is made to conceive a 
totality of things. Its theory of the world-process, its God, 
if it finds the solution in-a-Ged, is an embodiment, so to say, 
of the categories which it finds most -satisfactory. God is 
infinite, absolute, unconditioned, the First Cause, perhaps the 
true substantial reality of things. He is also—since a founda- 
tion is required for practice as well as for theory—an incarnation 


of the moral ideal. 


Here, then, we have reached the level of the philosophical, or, 


as we have called them, the spiritual religions, systems w tems which 


see ncentrate lence j focus and to illuminate 
all reality from one centre,—thought, as ever, becoming more 
comprehensive as it becomes more explicit. But such syntheses, 
however formed, contain in themselves the germ of contra- 
dictions,! the cause of which is not fully understood till thought 
has taken a fresh turn in which the genesis and function of 
conception in general is made the subject of inquiry. This, in 
its simplest form, is a return from the ideal to the actual, and 
as such is carried out in miniature in every special science. 
But the criticism of method has a deeper implication. It 


1 Speaking generally, these arise, as appears further on, from the mental 
attitude which takes the categories as vehicles of ultimate truth, rather than 
as modes of rendering experience and interconnecting experiences. The 
more the “‘ metaphysical stage” develops, 7. e. the more the mind disen- 
gages itself from imagery, and insists on exactitude of conception and 
reasoning, the more clearly the inherent difficulties of this point of view 
emerge. The contrast between the hard insufficiency, the narrow finiteness 
of the categories and the subtle plasticity, the boundlessness, the variability 
of experience becomes almost disruptive of thought. At times it forces the 
mind by a confusion of planes to find reality in the categories themselves, 
and not in metaphysics alone, but in many departments of ethics, politics 
and law, the lines of distinction and definition which conceptual thought 
draws become stones of stumbling when gradations of meaning and the 
actual continuity of nature are to be dealt with. The world of thought 
tends to fall apart from the world of experience. But thought is meaning- 
less unless it illuminates experience. This, as already indicated in principle 
by Aristotle, is the starting-point of criticism, alike of the special criticism 
of a particular science and of the general criticism of philosophical analysis. 


—_— a 


THE LINE OF ETHICAL DEVELOPMENT 621 


involves, when pushed through, an inquiry into the ultimate 
basis of knowledge, and the paradox of the inquiry is that since 
to inquire and examine is still to think, the very processes that 
are being examined have to be used in examining them. Nor 
can we who criticize place ourselves outside that which we are 
criticizing. The human mind is a structure which has grown 
up under conditions, and the thoughts which it forms and the 
criticisms which it passes on its thoughts depend upon that 
structure. Not only the thoughts, but the experience which 
they are to interpret is, again, conditioned by the structure of 
the sense organs. We are therefore compelled to regard the 
highest conceptions which the mind can reach as conditioned 
by the nature and limits of the mind itself, and to recognize 
that even though we could frame a theory which might com- 
mend itself to us as an adequate interpretation of our experience, 
ee oumerceranily Tolgy that 16 would express tho final 
truth about reality. But further, when our conceptions are 
“analyzed to the bottom they are found not to give an adequate 
interpretation of experience as a whole. On the contrary, it is 
when we endeavour to grasp our world as a totality that we fall 
into contradictions. Criticism, therefore, compels us to realize 
the limitations of our own thought, and to desist from the 
endeavour to force the universe into the narrow moulds which 
our experience has so far enabled us to frame, when what is 
needed is rather to enlarge our conceptions by taking in fresh 
experience. For it does not follow that because we find limits, 
these must be limits fixed for ever. On the contrary, the study 
of evolution indicates the possibility of indefinite growth. It 
helps us to understand how our mental structure has arisen 
from very humble beginnings, and how its methods, its logic 
and its philosophy have grown up in the continuous endeavour 
to grasp and organize its experience, and so direct and under- 
stand its own life. We measure a sufficiently great advance 
from the first dawn of consciousness in an animal which can 
just learn through pain, to the synthesis of the sciences and the 
analysis of philosophy, and we can in some degree judge thereby 
of the possibilities of further development. We can understand 
that what is readily intelligible to the highest human intelli- 
gence should be wholly inconceivable to a savage, and we must 
learn to understand that our own thought is no more final 
than that of the savage, but at best represents mental growth 
advanced by one stage. 
It does not follow that we are landed in mere scepticism. 
The thought which gives harmonious, coherent interpretation 


622 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


to experience is true so far as it goes. It is onlyes-e-final 
interpretation of Reality-that-itis never the whole truth. Yet 

a philosophy which does not yield final truth may have its 
aries as an approximation. Each new interpretation, provided 
it is honest and intelligent, carries us a stage forward. The 
error is only in taking the completion of the stage for the 
end of the journey. Truth, even ultimate truth, is no empty 
dream. She is a phantom only when we think that we grasp 
her. She is real when, recognizing that she is a being enthroned 
above us, we are content to touch the hem of her robe. 

The tendency of the critical movement which constitutes 
philosophy is therefore to trace the conceptions, methods and 
principles of thought to their elementary conditions in the 
nature of mind and its relations to reality. Starting from these 
conditions it re-models the whole idea of knowledge and of the 
nature and test of truth. Reality is conceived as something 
more than experience, and the truth attainable by man is seen 
to be only a partial approximation to the final truth of things. 
As a consequence thought is recognized as a growth, and its 
conceptions as the products of a given phase, having their 
genesis in earlier phases, and the test and measure of their 
validity in their power to contribute to that coherent, systematic 
interpretation of reality towards which growth aspires. 

Thus, in dragging to light the conditions of the cognitive 
process and the factors at work in the building up of thought, 
the philosophic movement renders the mind conscious of its own 
nature and history. Here it impinges on the results of the 
physical and social sciences which have been building up the 
conception of evolution, and the effect, according to the view of 
contemporary thought here taken, is to establish the conception 
of mind in growth as the central fact of experience and the 
basis from which we must start in the further interpretation, 
alike of knowledge and of conduct. 


4. Turning from the movement of Thought: in general to 
the special sphere of Ethics, we have now to summarize the 
evolution described in the previous chapters. The resulting 
picture of the phases of Ethical development will show a rough 
parallelism with that of Thought in general. ‘This could hardly 
be otherwise, since the two movements are in constant inter- 
action. At the same time, since other influences affect ethics 
the parallelism is not exact and must not be exaggerated, and 
this caution must be taken as qualifying the general descriptions 
which a summary statement can hardly avoid. We have to 


THE LINE OF ETHICAL DEVELOPMENT _ 623 


consider the evolution of the ethical idea, as it were, in its 
depth and breadth; that is to say, in the degree of clearness 
and intensity with which its distinctively ethical character is 
realized, and in the extent to which it succeeds in directing 
conduct and organizing life. In this evolution we have found 
several phases. Now the general features of the ethical idea, 
according to our analysis in the last chapter, are that every 
man as a responsible agent stands under certain obligations, 
whether to himself, to others, or to society as a whole, defined 
by the requirements of the common good; or, in other words, that 
men are deemed good or bad in accordance as they do or do not 
recognize certain rights and duties important to the welfare of 
society as a whole. Obligation is the general expression for the 
relations in which men accordingly stand, and itis (a) in the way 
in which obligation is conceived, and (b) in the conduct which 
it covers, that ethical evolution is principally seen. 

Now in the lowest stage of customary ethics obligations of a 
social character are undoubtedly recognized in a certain sense, 
but (1) they are almost entirely limited to the relations of men 
and women in small groups, and (2) though they tend to secure 
certain fundamental rights, yet the protection that they give 
is in large measure indirect. For example, human life is pro- 
tected by the blood feud, but the custom of the blood feud is 
not based upon the principle that human life is itself sacred, but 
on the principle that I must avenge a wrong done to a member 
of my kindred. Property is protected by the law of restitution 
or, within limits, of blood vengeance, yet when we look into the 
matter more closely we find that it is not because the thief ought 
to be punished, but rather because a man who has suffered theft 
may reasonably demand restitution or avenge himself. Similarly, 
the marriage tie is maintained in the sense that any husband 
may reasonably be expected to kill a man who violates it. The 
idea of justice is not separated from that of retaliation. Thus, 
the elementary rights and duties on which social life is founded 
can hardly as yet be said to be recognized as rights or duties, that 
is to say as matter of direct moral obligation, even in relation to 
fellow-members of the same society.1 Nor again, is character as 


1 It may be said (1) that, after all, there are from the first certain laws 
directly enforced by society, (2) that within the innermost group the 
general obligations of mutual aid and mutual forbearance are often, if not 
always, true “ categorical imperatives.”’ Both objections are valid so far 
as they go. But (as shown in Part I. chap. iii.) they only cover a section 
of the sphere of conduct. Many fundamental obligations are only recog- 
nized in the indirect sense explained. 

It may be urged that it is all a question of group-morality, that within 
the innermost group obligation is directly enforced, and that the tribe or 


624 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


yet, strictly speaking, the subject of a moral judgment. So little 
is this the case that primitive justice draws a very insufficient 
distinction between the intentional and the unintentional or 
between the agent and his relatives, and even personal identity 
is not clearly conceived when the actions of a man may freely be 
attributed to a spirit which possesses him temporarily. 

This view of customary morality is supported by what we 
know of primitive ideas as to the basis of custom, for in the 
lowest grades of ethical thought the sanction of conduct is found 
in taboos and other magical terrors or in the fear of vindictive 
and, resentful spirits. But the powers of magic have no moral 
purpose, and the spirits of animism are neither essentially moral 
nor immoral. In general they are guided, like men, by the law 
of retaliation. But the mere dread of vengeance from a spirit 
has no more morality in it than the corresponding dread of a 
man. On the whole, then, social rules in this stage, though 
doubtless supported by ethical feeling, are not yet clearly 
conceived as moral obligations. 

A step onwards is taken when certain rights and duties are 
attached to members of a society as such, when, e. g. it becomes 
a duty to protect life instead of merely aiding the avenger, to 
guard property instead of only countenancing retaliation upon 
the thief, to redress wrongs and yet in so doing to entertain 
questions of responsibility. This stage appears distinctly in the 
earlier civilizations, though remnants of cruder barbarism, of 
course, survive. ‘The essential features of group-morality are 
still retained. Obligations do not in principle exist in relation to 
those outside the group, and the moral consciousness is still 
drenched through with the old spirit of self-assertion, the passions 
appropriate to. the struggle for existence among small and ill- 
organized groups of mankind. On the other hand, certain social 
duties are now matters of direct obligation. The basis of this 
obligation is still in the supernatural, but with the development 





community is merely to be regarded as a wider group not yet fully brought © 
within the area of obligation. But this account would not comprehend all 
the facts, viz. (1) that the “ wider group ”’ here spoken of is normally a true 
society, the different members of which meet and mix freely. The later 
group-morality leaves out the stranger or the slave, but this earlier rule of 
custom does not properly include the associate and the equal. (2) That 
the “subjective ”’ side of morality as shown in the text is undeveloped. 
(3) That the magico-animistic basis of obligation is distinctly non-moral. 
Bearing in mind that we are nowhere in contact with the actually primitive, 
we may put it that the moral conceptions found in the simpler societies 
are such as we should expect at a stage in which morality proper, as a 
system of impartial and unconditionally binding rules, is still in process 
of formation. 


THE LINE OF ETHICAL DEVELOPMENT 625 


of religious ideas it tends to take a more ethical character. The 
deities, heroes and ancestors of the anthropomorphic religions, 
which on the whole are dominant in the higher barbarism and 
the earlier civilizations, are morally superior in the main to the 
animistic spirit, and would be still more so but for the persistence 
of myths dating from the animistic period. They are generally— 
though with some terrible exceptions when magical ideas per- 
sist—at least as just as a fairly good man, they are opposed to 
demons and to witchcraft, and in some instances they have an 
element of the ideal. Moreover, some gods or perhaps some 
specially developed spirits often undertake the special pro- 
tection of the moral law or branches thereof, and one or more 
of them are often judges of the dead. Thus, at this stage it is 
not uncommon to find that there are some gods who stand in an 
essential relation to ethics, and, though the fear of punishment 
is not a high motive, yet a god who punishes acts because they 
are wrong is very different from a god who merely avenges an 
injury. His existence is a recognition of the moral idea. But 
the spiritual needs imposed by the conception of judgment are 
insufficiently met at this stage by sacrifice or magical rites 
instead of repentance and forgiveness, and even if the gods prefer 
justice they are hardly as yet incorruptible judges. Considering 
morality as a whole at this stage we may say that certain social 
duties are recognized as obligations, and obligation is based on 
human and divine sanctions. But just as the social code is a 
confusion of “‘love and hate,’’ so the divine world is a blur of the 
just and the unjust, the righteous and the tyrannically wicked. 
There is as yet no thoroughly worked-out ethical ideal, human 
or superhuman. 

It is the emergence of such an ideal which gradually transforms 
the primitive code of blended love and hate. In close connection 
with the spiritualized ideal of religion, an ideal of character is 
set up in which there is no room for the virtues of enmity ; 
forgiveness replaces the duty of revenge, self-sacrifice the exac- 
tion of one’s due; the humility of self-suppression supplants 
the pride of self-assertion, missionary effort for the salvation 
of all mankind the narrower and more material ambitions of 
‘self, or family or nation. This implies a profound modification 
of the original moral consciousness which, arising under the 
influence of division into groups, has the anti-social or dis- 
uniting blended with its social or binding tendencies. The 
principal change that moral history records is the subjection of 
this side of morality to the purely social element in the moral 
consciousness. It is paralleled by a no less revolutionary 

ss 


626 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


———— 


change in religious thought. The materialistic deity disappears. 


God is spiritual, and the non-spiritual elements of His worship 
are gradually eliminated. True, the judgment of the dead (or as 


\ 


an alternative certain automatic consequences of good and bad © 


actions) hold a prominent place in the spiritual religions, but for 
the best minds the notion of retribution as a basis for morality 
is already transcended. God rules by love, and not by fear. 
On the other hand, in so far as the omnipotence of the Creator 
and the necessity of faith in Him as the basis of all goodness are 
hard pressed, the ethical falls into the second place and may 
even be opposed to the religious view. And the actual content 
of ethical teaching is affected by the position which it holds. 
Though the social qualities are emphasized, their social func- 
tion is often misunderstood, and self-suppression rather than 
development is the central point of the ethical ideal. And 
thus, though the teaching of the world religions laid the founda- 
tions of humanitarianism, it has often tended, paradoxically 
enough, to paralyze humanitarian energy, and by holding up an 
unrealizable ideal to remove virtue from the world and make it 
possible only in the monastery. 

At this stage, then, moral rules have references to a distinct 
ideal of life and character. This ideal still rests on some super- 
natural mode of being, but the supernatural is itself the incar- 
nation and expression of moral perfection. Idealism, however, 
is not necessarily critical, and a further step is taken, according 
to the view put forward in the previous chapters, when the 
attempt is made to set out systematically the full implications, 
personal and social, of the moral judgment. 

The attempt to construct or reconstruct the ethical order 
upon the basis of a reasoned theory of life was initiated by the 
philosophic movement of antiquity, which, though it appealed 
less strongly to feeling and missed at the outset some grace 
and, tenderness of the religious ideal, left the individual person- 
ality standing, and made the development of its faculties rather 
than their repression the end of conduct, recognizing that 
individuality has its claims, that even original self-assertion 
contained a kernel of truth, and that what humanity claims is 
self-devotion rather than self-effacement. But in proportion as 
the idea of personality becomes the centre of ethical teaching, 
it must follow that rights and duties are regarded as belonging 


to every human being as a responsible agent, and that human — 


character, the development of faculty and the living happiness 
of men and women, become the ends of life. A direct con- 
sequence of this view is that the duties and rights formerly 


THE LINE OF ETHICAL DEVELOPMENT 627 


dependent on membership of a group are now universalized. But 
with this universalism all of primitive custom that belongs to 
the law of enmity drops away, and the law of love is reached by 
another road and under another name. Humanity becomes_a 
ee ne tan of Nature—an ideal by which 
all “positive law should be judged—prescribes our duties as 
members thereof. 

But we are still only in the first phase of rationalism. The 
content of philosophic teaching required the inspiration of 
religion to be converted into a living universalism, the object 
of a missionary effort seeking actively and aggressively to 
spiritualize in the world. In this change as it was historically 
effected the rational basis was undermined, and modern rational- 
ism, instead of working continuously from the Greek basis, had 
to compass the return from the supernatural to nature. In so 
doing it (a) gave a social and positive interpretation to the 
doctrine of salvation, and thus applied the aggressive energy 
of religion to the spiritualization of actual life, while (6) it re- 
placed the conception of “nature” as a fixed and ideal standard 
by that of development—a process which can only be rightly 
appreciated after allowance is made for the thinker’s position 
within it. Our standards are the product of a spiritual move- 
ment at work within the race, and are subordinate to its ultimate 
ends. These ends we can appreciate at least in so far that 
they include the fullest and most harmonious development 
of the life of th 
guide to every form of ort. 

The ethical order being thus interpreted, the claims of duty 
are urged on the ground that when we thoroughly understand 
its nature and all its bearings on our own life and that of 
humanity, we are compelled as rational beings to recognize its 
validity, and admit that the ends to which it points are wider 
and greater than any private good of our own that may conflict 
with it. Thus for rationalism the moral basis les in the un- 
folding of the full meaning of the moral order, as that through 
which the human spirit grows. 

_ To summarize the whole evolution in the fewest possible 
words, it would appear that at the outset customary rules have 
not acquired the distinctive character of moral laws. Next, 
moral obligations are recognized, but are not yet founded on 
any general ethical principle. Up to this point the morality of 
primitive social tradition persists, wherein “‘love and hate,” the 
social and anti-social impulses are blended. In a third stage, 
moral principles and ideals of character and conduct are formed, 






628 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


partly by the influence of religious emotion, partly under the 
guidance of philosophic criticism, and these culminate in the 
doctrine of an evangelizing mission with the salvation of mankind - 
as its aim. But this salvation is conceived in supernatural 
terms, and reasoned ethical principle is subordinated to religious 
belief. Hence a further critical movement is required, con- 
stituting a fourth main stage in which the meaning of religious 
duty is interpreted in terms of human experience, and it is 
the development of the spiritual principle at work in the actual 
life of man that becomes the object of religion and supplies the 
canon of ethics. We may describe the whole process as one 
in which, by successive steps, the full meaning of the ethical 
principle becomes clear. Obligation, resting at first on occult 
forces or the resentment of vindictive spirits, and then on the 
wrath of a not unjust god, comes to be based on the nobler 
desire to be at one with God, or to realize a higher spiritual 
life and, finally, extrinsic consequences being dispensed with, 
on the inherent goodness of the life which it renders possible. 
‘The social bearings of morality emerge by a parallel process. 
Duties at first indirectly guaranteed become directly inculeated. 
Next, they are so extended as to overleap the bounds of group- 
morality and destroy the claims of self-assertion. Finally, 
the reason of the thing is rendered clear in the exposition of a 
spiritual development as the source and object of duties and 
rights alike. By successive stages obligation becomes first a 
distinct element in consciousness, and finally a principle, the 
whole meaning of which is gradually thought out. 


5. With the deepening consciousness of ethical meanings goes 
a wider and more coherent synthesis of experience and purpose. 
Primitive morality (whether in the first or second stage) builds 
up bodies of custom, introducing a measure of order into life. 
These rules are in an indirect manner fashioned by racial ex- 
perience, since they are handed on by tradition, and their effect 
upon the social welfare can seldom be without an influence in 
determining them. To this extent early morality may be said 
to direct conduct towards social welfare on the basis of past 
experience. On the other hand, the rules of conduct are not 
combined into a whole or harmonized by subordination to any 
clearly understood principle, whether an ideal of personal con- 
duct or of social organization. On the contrary, they are in 
large measure such as to justify social disharmony. 

In the ethics of the spiritual religions the correlation is more 
complete. There is an ideal of character, a principle of right- 


THE LINE OF ETHICAL DEVELOPMENT ~ 629 


living, to which all rules of conduct are subordinated. And 
this, being a rule of peace and love with all the world, contains 
at least the potentiality of a complete synthesis of human pur- 
poses. On the other hand, there is little disposition to take the 
actual experience of mankind into account, and in effect the 
tendency is to idealize one side of virtue—self-negation---and 
leave no room for the conception of self-development. On 
the social side also, though many of the best social virtues are 
exalted, there is a tendency to disregard the actual working of 
society as a merely mundane affair. Thus, though there is an 
express and deliberate correlation of the conceptions of good 
conduct, it is of a kind which leaves much that is most valuable 
outside its scope. 

The philosophical movement, by its criticism of the conceptions 
of good and bad, aims at a fuller correlation. Greek philosophy 
harmonized self-development with the common good of the city 
state, but had behind it less of the spiritual experience which 
builds up the idea of self-negation and none of the social experi- 
ence which could give life to the conception of a world polity. 
Modern thought, bringing ethics into relation to the theory of 
development, conceives a synthesis of which the total recorded 
experience of the race—an experience always operative, though 
in earlier stages less consciously—should be the basis, and the 
further development of mind in society the end—a correlation 
of past and future racial experience. 

It helps us to understand the character of ethical, as of all 
mental evolution, when we observe that at each stage the mind 
as it expands brings within its scope the conditions and in- 
fluences which have previously acted upon it unawares, but that 
in so doing it rationalizes and therefore modifies them. Thus 
the custom of the blood feud is enforced because it is custom, or 
nominally because it so pleases the gods. But the real value of 
it is that it tends to secure life. This is the latent or unconscious 
factor which fosters the institution in early society as making 
on the whole for order. In the next stage this factor enters into 
consciousness, and protection to person becomes a right and to 
recognize it a duty or a virtue. But words such as “right,” 
or ‘virtue,’ carry weight only because men make moral 
judgments, approve certain types of character, etc., and the 
implication is that a certain type of character, or of social or 
religious life, is the guide and norm of conduct. Accordingly 
the next step is that this ideal enters consciousness and is set 
before man as his end. But, lastly, the influences which deter- 
mine him in his preference of one character over another are a 


630 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


complex mass of traditions, instincts, partial reasonings. What 
is coherent in these appears to be what makes for the growth of 
mind in man, and the final step is to bring this aim into con- 
sciousness as a rational principle and the base of what went before. 
In looking backward over the process which has led us to this 
point we realize that the same factors, though not in the same 
rational form, have been present all along. The conditions of 
maintaining a social life operate in the very formation of social 
instinct and tradition. Custom, that is to say, is fixed by certain 
psychological forces and inter-relations of man and man, which 
arise, and are maintained, and grow, because the society which 
they engender can support itself in its environment. These 
forces all along underlie the work of consciousness, until bit by 
bit consciousness encroaches on them and takes them into itself. 
In so doing it transmutes them with something from its own 
quality. It makes them rational ends, and as such into forces 
that make not merely for life, but for a good life, and a life of 
growth and development. 

Though the phases of development here distinguished pass 
into one another by such gentle transitions that the very at- 
tempt made to distinguish them may appear artificial, the total 
change which they constitute is of no small importance. Taken 
as a whole it forms a distinct stage onward in the evolution of 
mind, not unfairly comparable to that which parts the mind of 
the lowest savage from that of the beast which he chases and 
adores. Just as mental evolution enters on a new phase—a 
change of kind so far as the phases of a continuous process are 
ever changes of kind— when the nascent human intelligence 
formulates for itself in general ideas experiences which were 
already operating to direct its inferences, though before it knew 
them not nor named them, so a gradual but not less fundamental 
revolution is effected as the “eye of the soul is turned’”’ upon 
the methods by which these generalizations are built up—that is 
to say, from the objects of thought to the processes by which they 
are formed, the conditions on which they rest—in a word, to the 
mind itself, its nature and potentialities1 At the beginning of 
this revolution the thought world is occupied by the fragmentary 
and confused ideas of the primitive mind, moulded without 


1 For we are dealing here with an order of reality—the ultimate con- 
ditions of knowing and being—which underlies the simple general truths 
of common sense just as these underlie the concrete and practical relations 
recognized by the animal mind, and to do so implies a new turn to mental 
activity—the bringing into consciousness of methods and processes—which 
is quite as profound a change as that involved in the first attempt to draw 
out the “‘universal’’ that lies in the particular. 


THE LINE OF ETHICAL DEVELOPMENT _ 631 


criticism in accordance with mental predispositions out of the 
mass of unsifted experience and tradition. At its end, as the 
result of a movement which extends from the first attempt to 
observe a fact or define an idea to the profoundest analysis of 
the conditions of the cognitive process, is the synthesis of racial 
experience in which the mind grasps the conditions and possibili- 
ties of its own development, conscious for the first time in the 
full sense of its own nature and growth. This movement has 
its close parallel in ethics. At the beginning is custom, with its 
blend of the ethical and unethical, accepted without criticism 
and guiding life without system or general plan. At the end 
is the rational order of conduct founded on the conditions of 
human development, and directed to the furtherance of that de- 
velopment as its supreme end. If, finally, we put together the 
results of the intellectual movement which reveal the conditions 
of development and of the ethical which make its furtherance 
the purpose of life, we recognize that the evolution of mind in 
man, from being a blind, unconscious, fitful process has become 
a purposive, self-directed movement. This is the fundamental 
change effected in the course of human history. 


6. So far we have traced ethical evolution as an evolution of 
thought. But in questions of morals it is easy, fatally easy, for 
thought to outstrip action. How far, then, does this develop- 
ment of conceptions correspond either to an actual improvement 
in social relations or in the character of human beings? The 
candid student cannot but feel grave doubts on this question 
from time to time when he turns from the disorders and tyrannies 
of our own day to the simple and harmonious life which he finds 
among many of the “lowest ’’ peoples. May it not be, he'is 
forced to ask, that at bottom the moral factor is, so to say, a 
permanent quantum not susceptible of constant increase or 
diminution, unaffected in essence by intellectual progress, but 
rather liable to grave lesions by social changes against which it 
recovers itself from time to time, so exhibiting the misleading 
appearance of periods of moral progress. Thus it may be urged 
that the genuine humanitarian progress of the Victorian era was 
but a desperately needed reaction against the tremendous social 
disorganization of the Industrial Revolution and the Napoleonic 
wars, and now that it has made things tolerable is in turn re- 
laxing its efforts and giving place to the creed of force and the 
self-centred will. As against this view it may be maintained 
that we may easily overestimate the moral value of harmony in 
the simpler social conditions. Social solidarity is one thing in 


632 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


a group of a couple of dozen men, women and children, and 
another when it is predicable of a nation of forty millions. Moral 
progress consists in surmounting difficulties and uniting elements 
which are naturally opposed. Simple societies may enjoy a 
measure of practical freedom and equality which is lost at a 
higher stage. But the discipline, the organization, the output of 
will-power evinced at such a stage are equally necessary to the 
permanent progress of human achievement. The intensive life 
of the small community has advantages which are lost in the 
ordered union of a great empire, but the extension of the area 
of peace is a step which advancing civilization must take. Social 
evolution is full of these antitheses, and the case for effectual 
moral progress is that, upon the whole, it makes for a synthesis. 
It goes for little to have the gentler qualities without the more 
assertive, chastity without passion, meekness without courage, 
liberty without the capacity for discipline, equality without 
the opportunity for domination. Repeatedly one limb of the 
antithesis grows at the expense of the other, and loss or gain 
may be recorded as suits the bias of the observer. On the whole, 
our survey goes to show that while no new elements arise, while 
human nature is fundamentally the same, the synthesis effected 
in the actual life of the modern state, incomplete as it is, is wider, 
fuller and richer than that of earlier times. The will grows— 
understanding by the will the organized energy of social endea- 
vour. It is at once more masterful and more disciplined, wider 
in purview, firmer in grip, and, on the whole, more conscious of 
its true purpose. 

In Social Evolution as a whole there is, in fact, a correlation, 
however rough and irregular in detail, with the ethical and 
religious development here set out. Among many simpler 
societies we see (1) the fundamental institutions of the family 
and government still very incomplete. We trace (2) the growing 
consolidation of the little community on the basis of kinship, 
then (3) the extension and improved organization of society on 
the principle of Authority and (4) finally, the advance towards a 
harmony between liberty and authority in the state. In the 
first two stages we have the morality of custom gradually passing 
into that of impartial law. In the third we have the reign of 
law and in its higher phases the ethics of the world-religions. 
The fourth is associated with humanitarian ideas. At the same 
time social growth does not always go with ethical progress. 
Social changes are in large measure unconscious, uncontrolled 
by any intelligent direction, and the more completely so the 
further we go back into the beginnings of history. Hence 


THE LINE OF ETHICAL DEVELOPMENT — 633 


they do not run precisely parallel with the growth of mind, 
but at times impede, at other times, again, forward it. But as 
the higher phases are reached the two processes fuse into one. 
For the state rests on a measure of Right in the relations of men, 
and is so constituted as to be modifiable by the deliberate act of 
the community. In the method in which changes are effected, 
indeed, we find a definite evolution from the unconscious and 
unnoted changes of custom, through the deliberate changes 
introduced on occasion by the fiat of authority to the organic 
legislation of the modern world in which at its best there is an 
effort to determine social progress in accordance with a rational 
ideal. When this stage is reached social and ethical evolution 
become one. This union becomes realized in proportion as the 
mind attains that control over its own growth which it already 
possesses over the processes of nature. Here, as Comte first 
made plain, lies the true significance of the history of science. 
Through science mind dominates nature; first physical nature, 
then organic nature, lastly the conditions—physical, psychologi- 
cal, social—of its own life and growth. This movement goes on 
at an ever accelerating rate, and as it proceeds the conditions of 
a rational guidance of social life are one by one being satisfied. 
At the basis of these stands the mastery of external natural 
conditions, in which regard the last hundred and fifty years 
have witnessed a complete revolution, and so far there is every 
indication that the changes of the coming century will be not 
less, but even more sweeping. Next come the laws of life, the 
conditions of health, the causes of disease, the factors of physi- 
cal evolution. The scientific treatment of these subjects can 
scarcely be said to be more than seventy years old, and it may 
. be maintained without exaggeration that, little as we know even 
now, the sum of what we have learnt in that time as to the true 
causation of disease, as to the nature of heredity and the modi- 
fiability of organisms, far outweighs all that had been learnt 
in the previous two thousand years. There follow the laws of 
mental growth, and here our own time has witnessed the emer- 
ence of psychology as a science, and education as a true art 
aiming at educing from the mind what is in it, aiding natural 
development, and stimulating or correcting it at need, as the 
physician follows the efforts of the body towards the restoration 
of the balance of health—the whole a conception still in merest 
infancy, but already promising a vigorous life. Here, then, 
we have the conditions forming for development of body and 
mind and their maintenance in health. To these have to be 
added the scientific adjustment of the relations of man to man— 


634 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


sociology. Here, again, we have a science in its infancy, but 
the mere attempt to deal with public questions in the spirit of 
science implies an advance ethical as well as intellectual. At 
any rate it is on the possibility of controlling social forces by the 
aid of social science as perfectly as natural forces are controlled 
at present by the aid of physical science, that the permanent 
progress of humanity must depend. 


7. For progress is not something that goes on of itself by an 
automatic law or an inherent tendency of things. The struggle 
for existence is not as such a force that makes for betterment, 
and in fact in human history we find epochs of progress followed 
by long ages of stagnation or retrogression. If the evil of the 
world overthrew the doctrine of unconditioned creation, the 
disorders and reactions of history are no less fatal to a purely 
teleological doctrine of the world process. There remains the 
possibility, however difficult to conceive in concrete shape, of a 
spirit subject to conditions and achieving its full growth only 
by mastering them. If this view is correct, progress is made 
only in so far as the conditions of life come more and more 
under the dominion of Mind. There is nothing in the scheme 
| of organic evolution to determine that the higher type should 
‘ prevail except the inherent strength of the type itself1 On the 
other side of the account let us bear in mind that there is no 
evidence of any permanent force working against the higher 
type as such, or singling it out, as it were, for destruction. Evil 
is not a positive force. There is no real Ahriman that strives 
with Ormuzd. Evil is merely the automatic result of the in- 
organic. Physical evil results from the impact on the spiritual 
order of natural causes which intelligence has not been able to 
subordinate to its ends, moral evil from the clashing of purpose 
in minds which have not been brought into an organic unity. 
Hence the working of that retributive principle in history where- 
by whatever is evil, being inorganic, conflicts with itself and 
perishes “ by its inherent badness,” while the elements of good- 
ness, of rational harmony, in the long run support and further 
one another, and this upon the whole at an accelerating rate in 
proportion as they have already acquired organic union. Here 
is that internal inherent strength on which the spiritual order 
depends for its ultimate victory. 


1 In so far as it bears on the ultimate question of the element of purpose 
in Reality as a whole (as distinguished from the scheme of organic evolu- 
tion), this statement should be qualified by the considerations advanced in 
Mind in Evolution, pp. 402-406, and more fully in Development and 
Purpose, Part II. 


THE LINE OF ETHICAL DEVELOPMENT 635 


Thus the principal method of spiritual progress lies in this— 
that what is achieved at one epoch is a starting-point for fresh 
development. Hence progress is sure and continuous in pro- 
portion as it depends on the principle of tradition, 7. e. in pro- 
portion as the gains of the past can be handed on and form a 
capital for advancing the operations of the future. This method 
is most readily applicable in the case of positive knowledge, 
wherein it is possible for every student to equip himself with 
. all that Newton or Darwin liave to teach. But when something 
more than mere learning is required, other factors enter in. 
Even in the realm of thought so far as the deeper principles are 
concerned, every man must in a measure go through for himself 
the processes which Hume or Kant thought out, if he would 
really understand what Hume and Kant mean. Still more is this 
true of moral thought. We must have some spiritual experience 
of our own to enable us to realize what the message of Christ or 
of Buddha means. There must at least be an inward mirror to 
reflect the spiritual light. Hence ethical truths have sometimes 
been lost, or at least have lain dormant till new prophets have _ 
arisen to inspire them with fresh life. Nevertheless tradition, — 
the mere contact with great ideas, counts for much in the ethical 
field, and there is, on the whole, a clear though not an uninter- 
rupted advance of ethical teaching.1 But when we come to the 
development of character, the third point of ethical growth, the 
case is altered. So far as ethical teaching affects character, tradi- 
tion has itsinfluence. But so far as the foundation of character 

is inherited by each of us from his parents wholly different 

1 The bearing of tradition on progress may be measured by comparing 
knowledge, morals and art. Knowledge—the whole collective achieve- 
ment of thought—takes the lead in progress because each generation can 
acquire the whole possessions of the past unimpaired and add to them its 
own. In ethical theory this is less easy in proportion as what is required 
is the deeper thinking-out of principles rather than the addition of past 
experiences. Nevertheless, the road once trodden is always easier to tra- 
verse anew. In ethical practice we have not only to learn, but to come to 
be, and this in large measure each must accomplish for himself, yet tra- 
dition still operates in that it is incorporated in law and custom and the 
spirit of a people. In art there seems to be epochs of progress in which 
some new vein is struck out by pioneers. This is worked by one artist 
after another, each learning from the last, till the best that can be done 
along that line is reached. The vein is then exhausted, and subsequent 
work along that line produces less and less ore and more and more dross. 
Tradition at this stage becomes a real barrier to progress. Meanwhile 
other pioneers are striking out in a fresh direction, and art revives in a new 
place. The cause of this brokenness of its history seems to be that the 
function of art is to give perfect expression—that is, expression in which 
the feeling-tone of the sense-symbols used precisely fits the thought ex- 


ressed—to whatever facet of experience the artist seeks to approach. 
en this is once done adequately it cannot be done again. 


636 MORALS IN EVOLUTION 


conditions apply, and the question whether the innate character- 
istics of men tend to improve, stands on a wholly different foot- 
ing from the question whether their collective achievements in 
the realm of thought and of conduct exhibit growth and develop- 
ment. The data for deciding this question do not appear as 
yet to be sufficient. The laws of heredity are in large measure 
unknown. So far as natural selection is concerned, its operation 
is known to be extremely slow, nor could it be favourable to 
character unless the conditions of life in society were through 
many generations such as to eliminate the more selfish, less 
honest, less generous type, and preserve in greater degree those 
who are more worthy. How far this has been the case I must 
not here attempt to determine. We can easily imagine that 
some virtues, such as parental love, have been fostered by the 
better chances of survival enjoyed by the children of loving 
parents. Of other virtues it is less easy to speak with any 
certainty. At many periods social institutions have directly 
tended to eliminate the stock of those best fitted to serve society. 
I think, for instance, of religious persecutions, or again of the 
ideal of celibacy which over great tracts of the world operated 
for centuries to deter many of the best men and women from 
perpetuating their stock. Nor is the question whether, morally 
considered, the human breed has in fact improved, by any means 
easy to settle empirically. Considering the improvement of | 
ethical conceptions, is the actual improvement in our conduct 
as compared with that of our ancestors greater than we might 
expect, or even as much as we might expect ? He would be a 
bold man who would found an argument for the improvement 
of the human breed by heredity on a dogmatic affirmation in 
reply to this question. Upon the whole we must be content for 
the present to leave this factor in evolution an uncertain quantity. 


Ethical progres. 1s ceentlally-aprogress-in-ofhical conceptions, 
acting through tradition. 


Thése conceptions, as they advance, are, as we have seen, in a 
manner realized in law and custom. Here the element of tra- 
dition plays its part. But in so far as the old vices of character 
remain, the work is always liable to be undone and needs con- 
stantly to be done over again. The very growth of society sets 
up new problems needing a re-thinking of old ethical ideas, so 
that here again the ethical advance is fitful and uncertain. As 
society becomes larger and more complex many of its obligations 
become more remote and impersonal. Losing their direct 
application to our neighbour whom we see, our charity and 
our sense of justice are diluted and lose their strength. Our 


THE LINE OF ETHICAL DEVELOPMENT 637 


Sympathies cease where our imagination fails to reach, and the 
great fabric of government is apt to become an inhuman machine 
advancing blindly over the living flesh and blood that happens 
to come in its way. Yet the vaster the social organism the 
greater is the triumph when justice, kindled to new life, has 
again sent a purified blood through its arteries. Its successes 
are achieved for larger portions of mankind, and their basis is 
wider and more secure. 

But if our general conception of evolution is correct, the 
further development of society will follow a very different course 
from its past history, in that it is destined to fall within the 
scope of an organizing intelligence, and thereby to be removed 
from the play of blind force to the sphere of rational order. 
Such a change must be gradual and attended with many set- 
backs. The very ideas which are to direct it are yet in their 
infancy. Yet the social self-consciousness which gives them 
birth, arrived at as it is by a blending of the moral, the scientific 
and the religious spirit, is for us the culminating fact of ethical 
evolution. But such an end can only be a beginning. Mind 
grasps the conditions of its development that it may master and 
make use of them in its further growth. Of the nature of that 
growth, whither it tends and what new shapes it will evolve, we 
as yet know little. It is enough for the moment to reach the 
idea of a self-conscious evolution of humanity, and to find therein 
a meaning and an element of purpose for the historical process 
which has led up to it. It is, at any rate, something to learn— 
as, if our present conclusion is sound, we do learn—that this 
slowly wrought out dominance of mind in things is the central 
fact of evolution. Yor if this is true it is the germ of a religion 
and an ethics which are as far removed from materialism as from 
the optimistic teleology of the metaphysician, or the half naive 
creeds of the churches. It gives a meaning to human effort, 
as neither the pawn of an overruling Providence nor the sport 
of blind force. It is a message of hope to the world, of suffering 
lessened and strife assuaged, not by fleeing from reason to the 
bosom of faith, but by the increasing rational control of things 
by that collective wisdom, the «is €vvés Adyos, which is all that 
we directly know of the Divine. 







mi i 
SN 


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Ay AN ? 





INDEX 


ABORTION, 468, 524 

Adoption of prisoners, 238 

Adultery, 185, 455 

Punishment of, 74, 76, 89, 91, 

119, 1385, 150, 174, 181, 186, 
192, 193, 195, 201, 205, 209, 
222 

Aged, treatment of, 340-1, 343, 
345 


Ainu, 166, 244, 339, 379, 432, 440 
Alabaster, E., 52, 87, 109, 194-6 
Aliens, 259, 297, 298, 338, 339 
Altruism, 580 
Ambrose, 214, 215, 262, 510, 520 
Amélineau, 186, 247, 342, 343 
America— 
British Colonies in, 125 
United States of, 127, 142 
Amos, 490, 492, 495 
Anabaptists, 522 
Angels, 500-2 
Ani, 186 
Animals— 
Duties to, 475 
in human form, 484 
Intelligence among, 7—10, 613-16 
Parental affection among, 6, 10 
Punishment of, 86, 87 
Regulation of behaviour among, 
1-10 
Social life of, 1, 6, 10 
Worship of, 377, 407 
Animatism, 374 
Animism, 367-80, 383-7, 397, 405, 
624 


in early civilization, 406, 409, 
412, 415 

in relation to morality, 419, 
424-30 
Anselm, 507 

Anthropomorphism, 403-5, 407, 


409, 414, 416, 426 ° 
Antisthenes, 562 
Apastamba, 189 
Arabs, 373 
Arbitration, 258, 267 


Aristippus, 562 
Aristotle, 65, 204, 205, 
517, 554 seq., 565 
Asceticism, 473, 524 
Asoka, 483 
Association, right of, 361—4 
Assyrians, 249 
Atonement, 444, 445, 507 
Augustine, 262, 263, 449-501, 509, 
510, 520, 522, 582 
Australians, 235, 241, 369, 370, 
382, 390, 391, 395, 396, 419, 434 
Exogamy among, 45, 46, 135, 143 
Justice among, 75, 82, 89, 95-8, 
103, 107, 117 
Totemism among, 45 
Tribal structure of, 45—6, 52, 136-8 
Authority, principle of, 55 seq., 69 


257, 258, 


Babylon, ancient, 133, 248, 249, 
380-2, 343, 406, 412-15, 441, 
442, 450-2 

Bancroft, H. H., 72, 73, 92, 95 

Batchelor, J., 166, 244, 339, 379, 
432, 440 

Baudhayana, 189, 344 

Benefit of clergy, 123, 309 

Benefit societies, 348 

Benevolence, 343, 381-3, 488, 536, 
538, 542 

and Justice, 533 

Bentham, J., 125, 587-90 

Biot, 253 

Birth-rate, 6 

Blackstone, 219-22, 309 

Blessing, 421 

Blood-feud, 73 seq. 

and composition, 75, 78 

and retaliation, 73 

Gradual suppression of, 99-102 
Mitigation of, 100 seq. 

Boaz, Dr. F., 50, 90, 92, 162, 322, 
323, 390, 394, 395, 426, 432, 
434, 441 

Book of the Dead, 185, 341, 443, 
450, 452-5 


639 


640 


Brahmanism, 459, 461, 470 seq. 
Doctrine of austerity, 472 
Doctrine of charity, 472 
Doctrine of penance, 472 
Ethical conceptions, 472-7 
Theory of reality, 477 
Theory of the self, 470, 471 

Breasted, J. H., 108, 109, 328, 410, 

411, 457 

Bridges, J. H., 593 

British Empire, 228, 229 

Brown, W. Adams, 498—9, 503, 506 

Bruns, C. J., 90, 206—8, 236, 425 

Bryce, Lord, 207, 208, 210, 217, 

230 

Buddhism, 

514-18 
Doctrine of Karma, 478, 479 
Doctrine of Nirvana, 478 
Ethical conceptions, 475, 479 seq. 

Buddhist Suttas, 479, 480, 482-3 

Budge, EH. A., 185, 341, 443, 452 

Busolt, G., 54, 204, 205, 206, 257-9, 

295, 296, 298, 340 


127, 459, 477 seq., 


Calvin, 502-3, 508, 512, 521 
Cambridge expedition, 150, 155, 
173,'328, 437 
Cambridge Natural History, 4 
Cannibalism, 239, 240-2 
and human sacrifice, 408, 409, 
464 
Canon law, 113, 144, 148, 213 seq., 
262, 263, 508, 509, 510, 513, 
514, 520-2, 581, 582 
Carpenter, Dr. J. H., 490, 495 
Caste, 57, 271, 272, 474 
Criticism of, 292 
in India, 290-2, 344 
in modern -civilization, 309, 315 
in the uncivilized world, 274 
Categories, 545, 618-20 
Catlin, G., 29, 167, 236, 238, 239, 
339, 340, 341, 392 
Charity, 341, 463, 466, 467 
Chastity, 172—4, 192, 193, 243, 481 
Children, 238, 250, 257, 260, 338-9 
China— 
Kthical conceptions, 58, 86-7, 
109, 127, 133, 253 seq., Part II, 
ch. v. 
Family, 193-7 
Law and custom, 293, 343 
Magical conceptions, 383 
Religious conceptions, 368, 379 
Christianity, 221, 262-4, 279, 301 
seq., 312, 313, 348 
See Monotheism. 


INDEX 


Church— 
and state, 568 
and the world, 519 seq. 
Influence of, 213 seq., 262, 301 
Primitive, 519 
Cicero, 210 
Citizenship, Principle of, 43, 60 seq., 
559, 560 
Clan system, 47—9, 51 
Class distinctions, Part I, ch. vi, 
in modern Europe, 318 seq., 543 
Classification— 
Difficulties of, 31 seq. 
of the simpler peoples, 38 seq. 
Codes, multiplicity of, 23, 24 
Codrington, 163, 167, 345, 398, 421, 
434 
Common good, 539 
Communism, 322 seq. 
Comparative ethics— 
Difficulties of, 25 seq. 
Method of, 25 seq. 
Scope of, 18, 19, 23-5, 35, 36 
Compurgation, 115 
Concubinage, 133, 180, 182, 185, 
194, 198, 203, 205, 207 
Confession, 441, 474 
Confucius, 127, 517, 528-35, 543 
Conquered communities, treatment 
of, 260, 261 
Conscience, 571 
Conservatism, 493 
Constantine, 216, 523 
Contract, in early law, 333—4 
Contract labour, 314 
Cornish, C., 6 
Council of Trent, 508, 510, 511, 514 
Criticism, 545, 546 
Philosophic, 620, 621 
Curr, HE. M., 75, 95, 440 
Curses, magical effect of, 421, 427 
Custom, 1, 539, 624, 630, 631 
and habit, 12 
and law, 61 
and tradition 12 
Factors in growth of, 12-14, 30, 
402, 445, 616, 617 
Sanctity of, among primitive 
man, 17, 18 
Penalty for breach of, 420 seq. 
Cynics, 562 


Dalton, E., 170, 394, 395, 432, 436 

Danks, 143 

Dareste, R., 86, 202, 281 

Debt, punishment of, 75, 82 

De Groot, J. J. H., 196, 368, 369, 
370, 371, 372, 383, 485, 538 


INDEX 


Deity, conception of, 248-50, 260 
See Monotheism and Polytheism. 
Democracy, 66 
Demons, 412, 464-7 
Desire, 598-600, 615-16 
Determinism, 503-5 
Deuteronomy, 198, 199, 236, 250, 
251, 288, 345, 490, 493 
Dhammapada, 483-5 
Dicey, Prof., 608 
Dill, Prof., 211, 348 
Diodorus, 183, 283, 286, 319, 378 
Dionysius, 206, 207 
Divorce. See Marriage. 
Dorsey, J. A., 79, 99, 157, 326, 388, 
391 
Douglas, R. K., 194, 195, 196, 379, 
539 
Driver, S. R., 199, 490 
Dualism, 470 
Duel, Judicial, 59, 112, 113, 116 
Non-judicial, 113 
of abuse, 96 
Duncker, M., 128, 188, 252, 253, 
291 
Durkheim, Prof., 400, 401 
Duty, 570 
Dyaks, 26, 376 


Ecclesiasticus, Book of, 200, 289 
Egoism, 578 
Egyptians, 144 
Ethical conceptions, 28, 58, 341- 
3, 453-8 
Family, 183 seq. 
Law and custom, 150, 179, 282-6, 
319 
Religious conceptions, 369, 406- 
12, 438, 441, 443-4 
Warfare among, 247-8 
Eis, A. B., 83, 143, 151, 157, 
166, 240, 273, 402, 403, 425, 
431 
Elmira system, 127 
Endogamy, 142 seq. 
England, 508 
Family in, 228 
Justice in Anglo-Saxon, 82, 86 
Justice in medieval, 76 seq., 86, 
101, 118 seq., 121 seq., 320-1, 
350 
Modern law, 123 seq., 144, 325, 
351 
Epictetus, 517, 564, 565 
Erinnys, 369, 427-9 
Erman, A., 187, 248, 283, 284, 
342 
Esmein, A., 120 
iba 


641 


Ethical conceptions— 
Development of, 618 seq. 
Difficulties of comparing, 27, 28 
in early culture, 446, 623-5 
in oriental civilization, 449-58, 

462-9 
Rationalist, 544 

Kthical consciousness, 449 ¥4 

Ethics as regulation of life, 613 

Evangelicals, 125 | 

Evil, 495, 496, 499-503, 634 

Evolution, self-conscious, 637 

Exodus, Book of, 287, 320, 345, 

491 

Exogamy, 50, 51, 135, 142 seq. 

Experience, 385-7 
Animals learning by, 613 seq. 
Correlation of, 613 seq. 

Ezekiel, 494, 496 


Factory Acts, 335 
Faith, 508, 513-15, 626 
Family— 
Joint, 49 
Patriarchal, 49, 53. See Father- 
right; Mother-right; Marriage. 
Farnell, L. R., 413, 429, 430 
Father-right, 47, 51, 143, 159 seq., 
168, 178-9 
Feudalism, 56, 57 
Flinders Petrie, W. M., 41, 186, 
247, 248, 283, 455-7 
Food, magic influence on, 381 


Forgiveness, 483, 484, 518, 533, 
534, 625 
Fornication, 185, 477 
forbidden, 201, 213, 215 
Punishment of, 194, 209, 216, 
222 
Fowle, T. W., 350, 351 
France— 


The family, 224, 225, 226 
Law and custom, 87, 120-2, 126, 
306, 307, 310 
Franciscus a@ Victoria, 263, 267 
Frazer, J. G., 242, 367, 368, 372, 
376, 377, 378, 381, 383, 403 
404, 439-41 
Free-will, 500 seq. 
French Revolution, 585, 586 
Friedlander, L., 211, 348 
Friends, Society of, 125, 267, 313, 
523 


Future judgment, 626 
life, 431 seq., 441, 468, 474 


Gaius, 209 
Gambling, 538 


642 


Gardiner, 108, 109, 183-4, 187, 411, 
455, 458 
Gautama, 192 
General will, 61 
Genesis, Book of, 197, 198, 490 
Germans, 76, 91, 101, 112, 122, 
142, 161, 165, 178, 213, 218, 
220, 226, 300, 311, 340 
Girard, P. F., 52, 207, 209, 210, 298, 
299, 321, 330, 333 
Goddard, P. E., 95 
Godden, Gertrude, 79, 142, 
242, 243, 274, 319, 394 
Good, conception of, 19, 544, 551 
seq. 
affected by non-moral causes, 19 
affected by religious ideas, 19, 20 
affected by social changes, 20-22 
The common, 60, 62, 63 
Government, 60, 61, 67, 68 
Duties of, 539-40 
Grace, 509, 513 & 
Gratian. See Canon law. 
Great Man, the, 530, 536 
Great Spirit, 393 
Greek Church, 225] 
Greeks, ancient, 111, 135, 
346-7 
Ethical conceptions, 548 
Family among, 203-6 
Law and custom of, 256-8, 295-8 
Magical conceptions of, 421 
Philosophy of, 258, 259, 299, 
417, 544 seq., 569, 575, 601, 
604 
Religious conceptions of, 
415-17, 427-30, 438 
Griffith, F. Ll., 183-7, 286, 343, 
412, 444, 452, 453, 455-6 
Grote, G., 135 
Grotius, 259-64, 267, 302, 582 
Group— 
. Marriage. See Marriage. 
Morality, Part I, chs. vi, 
355, 547, 623-5 
Organization and government, 
45 seq. 
Relationship, 47 


Hagen, B., 43, 44, 95, 140, 436 

Hall, W. H., 263 

Hammurabi, 48, 74, 77, 82, 86, 
109, 180-3, 281, 287, 321, 327 

Happiness, 555, 563, 571, 572, 580, 
597, 600 

Harnack, 498, 507, 509, 510, 511 

Harrison, J. H., 415-17, 421, 428 

Hartley, 572 


151, 


160, 


3735 


Vi, 


INDEX 


Hawes, 41 
Head-hunting, 26, 242-3, 245 
Hebrew Prophets, 251, 252, 345, 
490 seq. 
Hebrews— 
Ethical development of, 492 seq. 
Family life, 197-200 
Law and custom, 84-5, 88, 90, 
101, 118, 144, 148, 155, 167, 
250-2, 286-9, 320, 330, 345 
Religious development, 90, 250-2, 
489 seq. 
Hedonism, 562 
Hegel, 590, 594, 595 
Heraclitus, 549 
Heredity— 
Effect upon behaviour, 3, 5, 6, 
7, 8, 613-14, 635, 636 
and character, 10-12 
in man, Il 
Herodotus, 65, 138, 204, 235, 257-8, 
295, 430 
Hesiod, 346 
Hobbes, 571, 584 
Homer, 29, 203, 256, 295 
Homicide, 75, 76, 84-6, 94, 99, 107, 
110, 111 
Hospitality, 236, 338-9, 342, 344 
Howard, G. E., 124, 125, 134, 148, 
149, 150, 151, 153, 212, 213, 
214, 215, 217, 222, 223, 230 
Howitt, A. W., 44-6, 74-5, 90-1, 
95, 97, 103, 157, 174, 325, 
391-2, 395-6, 425, 436 
Hughes, T. P., 200, 201, 293-4 
Humanitarianism, 609-612 
Humanity, 268, 316, 317, 356-7, 
360, 364, 543, 590 seq., 606-8, 
626-7 
Human sacrifice, 240, 242, 247, 
274 
Hume, 572 
Humility, 483, 566 
Ruth, Alas 144, 145 


Idealism, 527 seq., 574, 626 

Ideals, varying effect of, upon con- 
duct, 23-5 

Ihering, R. von, 52, 91 

Impulse and desire, 9, 598-600, 


614-15 
India— 
Family life, 48, 49, 135, 142, 143, 
161, 188-93. 
Law and custom, 252-3, 289-93, 
344 
Religious 461-4, 


conceptions, 
470 seq. ; 


INDEX 


Individual and society, 569, 570 
Indulgences, 511 
Infanticide, 206, 218, 339, 340 
Ingram, J. K., 300, 310-14 
Inquest, 119 
Instinct, 4-6, 145-6 
in man, I], 15 
Intelligence, growth of, 614 seq. 
Human, 616 
International law, 257, 264, 265 
right, 266—9 
Intuitionism, 572 
Isaiah, Book of, 252, 493-5 
Islam, 200-2, 293-5 


Japan, 86, 87, 119, 133, 168 
Jastrow, M., 412-15, 442 
Jenks, E., 118 
Jeremiah, Book of, 288, 493, 496 
Jerome, 520 
Jeune, Sir F., 209 
Jevons, F. B., 373, 398, 421 
Johns, C. H. W., 180, 181 
Joint family, 79 
Judges, Book of, 251, 489 
Justice, phases in the development 
of, 70 seq., 550, 552 seq. 
Blood-feud, the, 73 seq., 81 seq., 
130 
Composition, 75 seq., 130 
Early procedure, 114 seq. 
Execution of sentence, 118 
Growth of public, 88 seq., 354—5 
Influence of Central Authority, 
94, 97, 101 
Influence of rank, 77, 78 
inside the clan, 79, 80, 103 
inside the family, 79 
in the modern state, 124 seq. 
Outside the clan, 79, 80, 103 
Period of severity, 122-4 
Principle of collective responsi- 
bility, 81-3, 87, 88 
Justinian, 523 


Kant, 573 seq. 
Kidd, B., 595 
Kings, Book of, 251, 286, 489 
Kingsley, Mary, 370, 371 
Kinship— 
Affinity as basis of, 143 
Classificatory, 137, 143 
Society based on, 43 seq., 53-4 
Kohler, J., 78, 82, 89, 90, 133, 138, 
139, 149, 150, 163, 165, 167, 
168, 171, 175, 180, 326 
Kohler and Peiser, 48, 182, 183 


643 


Koran, 202, 261, 339, 346, 497, 
508 


Kovalevsky, M., 138, 330 
Kropotkin, Prince, 416 
Kuenen, 491 


Labourer, position of, in England, 
308-10, 349-51 

La Cour and Appel, 41 

Laffitte, P., 343 

Lao-Tsze, 475, 485 seq., 516 

Law, 61, 65 

Basis of, 550, 551. See Justice. 

Lecky, W. HE. H., 221, 523 

Legge, G., 194, 253, 293, 343, 538 

Leist, B. W., 203, 204, 425, 428, 
431 

Letourneau, C., 134, 151, 157, 170, 
173, 204, 235, 242, 245, 246, 
259, 260, 273-5, 279, 280, 300 

Levirate, The, 157, 193 

Leviticus, Book of, 199, 288, 345 

Liberty, 67, 68, 358-60, 586 seq. 

Life, sanctity of, 475, 480 

Lloyd-Morgan, C., 2, 6 

Loch, C. S., 345-51 

Locke, 583 

Luther, 508, 512 

Lyall, A., 373 


Magic, 380-7, 397, 408, 409 
and morals, 243, 318, 420-3, 
445, 467, 473 
and mysticism, 485, 486 
and religion, 397-8, 401, 424, 
439, 444, 445, 468, 491, 492 
Maine, H. S., 161, 333-4 
Malays, 47—9, 78, 81, 151, 166, 168, 
172, 368 
Man, E. H., 71, 148, 239, 340 
Mana, 242, 387 


Manu, 48, 52, 109, 161, 189-93, 
253, 290, 291, 334, 344, 364, 
472, 474-6 


Marcus Aurelius, 517, 568 
Marett, R. R., 374, 388, 389 
Marriage, by capture, 152, 
163, 164, 189 
by consent, 152, 156-8, 190, 194, 
209, 213 
by consideration rendered, 152, 
154, 164 
by exchange, 156 
by go-betweens, 194 
by purchase, 154, 157, 165, 180, 
188, 189, 197 
by service, 155, 197 
contracts, 182, 183, 185 


153, 


644 


Marriage— 
Dissolution of (Law of divorce), 
in European civilization, 204, 
207, 208, 210, 211, 214-17, 
222, 225-31 
in oriental civilization, 180-1, 
184, 191, 195, 197, 198—9, 200 
in uncivilized world, 147 seq., 
172, 178 
under varying conditions, 147 
seq., 225-31 
Group, 135-8 
Law and custom relating to, 
Part I, chs. iv, v. 
Monogamous, 133, 140, 141 
Polyandrous, 134, 135, 141, 176, 
178 
Polygamous, 133, 139, 140, 141, 
172, 178, 181, 185, 188, 194, 
200, 201 
Polygynous, 133 
Promiscuous, 138, 178 
Questions concerning, 133 
Religious conception of, 159 
Restrictions on, 52, 53, 142 seq. 
Varying relations of husband and 
wife, 159, 167 seq., 179, 183, 
188, 195-7, 199-200, 203, 208- 
10, 218 seq. 
Married Women’s Property Acts, 
223 
Martin, R., 43, 44, 140, 391 
Maspero, G., 58, 185, 282-4, 318, 
342, 406-10, 420 
Materialism, 493 
Matriarchy, 47, 159, 187 
Max Miller, W., 144, 
283 
Mayne, J. D., 48, 49, 52, 135, 161, 
189, 327, 330 
Mazdaism, 364, 374, 467, 468 
Meissner, B., 48, 182, 280, 281, 
282 
Melanesians, 383, 387, 420 
Mencius, 255-6, 531, 535-41 
Middle Ages, 112, 113, 120, 
212 seq., 301-8, 310, 311 
Influence of Church in, 112, 120, 
128, 131, 144, 568 
Mill, J., 572 
Mill, John Stuart, 572, 589 
Modern ethics, 568 seq. 
Mohammed, 80, 200-2 
Mohammedanism, 261-2, 
498, 503, 508, 515 
Mohammedan law, 82, 86, 110, 133, 
144 
Mommsen, T., 52, 112, 261 


185, 187, 


278-9, 


INDEX 


Monogamy, 524 
in early civilization, 185 
in European civilization, 215 
in oriental civilization, 198 
in uncivilized world, 133, 140-1 
Monotheism— 
Approaches to, 489 
Conception of the deity, 496 seq. 
Effect of ethical teaching, 522 
Ethical, 496 seq. 
Ethical conceptions of, 497, 506 
seq., 515 seq. 
exclusive salvation, 508 
in early Judaism, 489 seq. 
Tendency to, in early religions, 
391-6, 409-12, 415, 460, 463, 
489 seq. 
Montefiore, C. G., 200, 489, 491, 
495, 496 
Morality— 
Conditions of advance in, 18, 31 
Instinctive elements in, 14 
Relation to sympathy, 15 
Moral sanctions in early thought, 
419 seq., 508, 547 
Moral standard, -31, 558 seq. 
affected by reciprocity, 16 
affected by self-interest, 16 
based on human character, 14-16 
Fundamental uniformity of, 28 
related to social conditions, 16-18 
22, 31, 33 seq. 
Varying effectiveness of, 23-25 
Morgan, L. H., 49, 50, 78, 141, 170, 
326, 338, 339, 441 
Morice, 49, 323, 329 
Mother, respect for, 186 
Mother-right, 47, 49, 51, 159-61, 
167 seq., 179, 187, 197 
Muir, T., 188, 290, 292, 462, 463, 
464 
Mysticism, 416, 417, 470-3, 485 


seq. 
Myth-making, 389 seq. 


Natural rights, 584 seq. 
Natural selection, 5 
Nature, 518, 550 
as foundation of virtue, 530, 
536-8, 542, 553 seq., 558, 562, 
569, 571, 583 
Law of, 264, 562 seq., 571, 581 
seq., 627 
Nationalism, 362 
Niyoga, custom of, 193 
Non-resiStance, 262, 267 
North American Indians, 49, 50, 79, 
89, 90, 92, 134, 139, 141, 142, 


INDEX 


157, 167, 169, 170, 172, 

175, 236, 238, 241, 242, 245, 

319, 326, 338-41, 376, 
390, 392, 394, 420, 424, 432, 
434, 441 

Numbers, Book of, 199, 250, 330, 
491 


Oath, 115, 116, 131 

Obligation, 555, 575 seq., 623, 628 
Old, W. G., 485-7 

Omnipotence, 499-506, 627 
Oppert, O., 282 

Ordeals, 97, 116, 117 

Owen, R., 214 


Paine, Tom, 584-6 
Palmer, R. H., 81, 417, 498, 508 
Pantheism, 410, 459, 498 
Parents, duty to, 538, 
Rights of, 183 
Parker, Mrs. K. L., 117, 150, 156, 
395, 434 
Paternity, 163 
Patriarchate, 47, 149, 159, 183, 188, 
195, 197, 203, 206, 212, 462 
Payne, E. J., 32, 342, 370, 438 
Peace, Ideal of, 252 seq., 267, 495 
Peasantry, in modern Europe, 311 
Pelagius, 500 
Penance, 509 seq. 
Perfection, 483, 485 
Personality, 193, 358 seq., 560 
Transference of, 238 
Pharisaism, 423 
Philosophie life, 560, 561 
Pike, L.0., 124 >. 
Plato, 16, 205, 258, 296, 517, 552 
seq., 556, 557, 568 
Pleasure and pain, 8, 572, 596, 
599, 600 
Pollock and Maitland, 74, 76, 77, 
86, .101, 115, 119, 121, 128, 
218, 219, 302, 307, 319, 320, 
520 
Polyandry, 134, 135, 205 
Polygamy, 33, 132-4, 139-41, 178, 
181, 182, 185, 188, 192, 198, 
200, 201, 213 
in European civilization, 215 
Polytheism, 402-6, 409, 416-18, 
428-30, 459, 490 
Poor— — 
in classical civilizations, 346-8 
in Middle Ages, 348-50 
in modern Europe, 350-3 
in oriental civilizations, 341-6 
Popular Sovereignty, 360 


645 


Post, A. H., 48, 52, 74, 76, 78, 79, 
81, 82, 83, 84, 86, 87, 101, 116, 
119, 133, 142, 148, 149, 150, 
151, 155, 157, 160, 165, 166, 
167, 173-5, 239, 245, 273, 279, 
319, 326, 333, 424 

Powell, J. W., 48, 103 

Powers, S., 91, 139, 149, 175, 239, 
394, 435 

Prayer, 413-15, 426, 442, 443, 
450-2, 468 

Predestination, 500 seq. 

Primitive thought, 27 

Prisoners, treatment of, 237 seq. 

Private judgment, 570 

Progress, 30, 36, 634 seq. 

Promiscuity, 133, 138 

Property, Part I, ch. viii, 447, 
522, 608 

Protestantism, 144, 222. See Calvin 
and Luther. 

Proverbs, Book of, 198 

Ptah-Hotep, 185, 186, 527 

Punishment, by branding, 126 

by imprisonment, 126, 127 

by mutilation, 128 

by transportation, 126 

Capital, 126-8, 535 

Eternal, 500 seq. 

Future, 431 seq., 626 

Growth of severity in, 122-4 

Public, 89, 90, 100, 104, seq. 

Reform of, in modern times, 124 
seq. 

Rational conception of, 124 seq. 

Purification, 476 

Purpose, 2-3 


Quarter, 244, 245, 249, 252, 253, 
258, 260, 262 

Refused, 237, 239 seq., 249, 253, 
256, 259, 262 


Ransom, 257 

Rationalism, 572 seq., 607, 611, 
626-7 

Rationalists, 125 

Ratzel, 26, 151, 167, 172, 274, 275 

Reality, 546, 596, 622 

Reason and desire, 572 seq. 

Reclus, E#., 134, 135, 144, 151, 171, 
234, 236, 244, 275, 340, 341, 
376, 377, 419, 421, 431, 432 

Reflex action, 2, 3, 613 

Regicide, 541 

Relativity, 606-9 

Religion, 398, 459, 460 

as giound of social union, 43 


646 


Religion— 
Development of, 619 seq. 
Relation to ethics, 591 seq. 
See Animism, Polytheism, Mo- 
notheism, etc. 
Remorse, 422, 423 
Repentance, 474, 492 
' Responsibility, 83 seq. 
Collective, 81, 82 
Individual, 128, 129 
vicarious, 81 
Retaliation, See Justice. 
Retribution, 469 . 
Rhys Davids, T. W., 475, 480-3 
Rightlessness, 273, 277, 285, 286, 
295, 297, 299 
Rights— 
Gradation of, 272, 277- 
301, 305, 309, 
in modern state, 130, 131 
in primitive and advanced 
thought, 129, 60 
Personal, 60 seq. 
Robertson Smith, 118, 345, 444 
Roman Jurists, 299, 566 
Rome— 
Early conditions, 59, 259-61 
Family life, 148, 178, 206-12, 340 
Government, 90, 110, 122 
Law and custom, 298-300, 321, 
330, 347-8 
Religions conceptions, 373, 429 
Roth, W. E., 47, 98, 103, 107, 166, 
395, 436 
Roumania, 225 
Rousseau, 584, 585 
Russia, 225, 311 


80, 291, 


Sacrifice, 409, 444, 464, 492 

Samuel, Book of, 489, 491 

Satan, 496 

Saussaye, P. de la, 373, 393-4, 404 

Savages— 

How far comparable to primitive 
men, 25 
Moral qualities of, 25, 26, 27 

Sayce, A. H., 248, 249, 342 

Scandinavia, 227 

Scape-goat, 439 

Schmidt, 144, 150, 163, 165, 245, 
275, 340 

Schoolcraft, 92, 141, 149, 159, 238, 
243, 275, 326, 339-41, 394, 
420 

Schoolcraft-Drake, 149, 239, 243, 
319, 339, 394, 420 

Schroder, R., 77, 91, 101, 115, 120, 
122, 301-3, 315, 306, 333, 340 


INDEX 


Science, 633 
Scotland, 228 
Self, 470, 471 
assertion, 515, 624 
denial, 524 
development, 561, 629 
interest, 16 
sacrifice, 570 
suppression, 561, 615, 629 
Seligmann, C. G., 43, 44, 140, 171, 
324, 396, 400, 495, 437, 438 
Serfdom, 57, 271, 278, 279, 283, 
284, 296, 297, 300, 304 seq., 350 
Servia, 225 
She-King, 194-7, 253, 254, 293, 343 
Shoo-King, 254, 343 
Sidgwick, A., 428 
Sidgwick, H., 65 
‘* Simpler Peoples,” 39, 54, 76, 78, 
83, 105, 117, 153, 162, 166, 
171, 174, 175, 177, 234, 238, 
244, 275, 329, 340 
Sin, 507 
purging, 439, 442 
Slavery, 122 
Abolition of, 312 seq. 
and forced labour, 314 
Conditions of, 57, 59, 66, 244, 272 
Criticism of, 229 
for debt, 277, 280, 281, 296, 299 
General conception of, 271, 272 
Grades of, 277, 278 
Hereditary, 277 
in Oriental civilization, 280—95 
in uncivilized world, 272-80 
Modern Negro, 312-14 
of co-religionists forbidden, 293, 


Question of, 258-9 
Slaves— 
Domestic and foreign, 286-9 
Duty to, 344 
Manumission of, 
_ 294, 303, 310 
Position of, in England, 308 
Prohibition to recruit from cap- 
tives, 261-3, 301, 302 
Protection of, 198, 277-81, 286-9, 
293, 296 
recruited from captives, 239, 
244 seq., 250, 256, 257, 260, 
262, 273, 274, 275, 277, 282, 
295, 296 
Slave- trade, 280, 293, 302, 
Abolition of, 313, 314 
Social changes, 20-2 
Socialists, 522 
Social organization, 43 seq. 


encouraged, 


INDEX 


Social reform, 493, 633 
Socrates, 544, 551, 555 
Sophists, 549, 550 
Sorcerers, Punishment of, 81, 89 ~ 
Soul, 317 seq. 
Spencer, H., 168 
Spencer and. Gillen, Messrs., 45, 46, 
75, 86, 89, 136, 157, 163, 164, 
175, 235, 241, 322, 370, 377, 
381, 389-91, 393, 419, 420, 425 
Spirit, 471 
in evolution, 506, 594 seq., 621, 
622, 629 seq. 
Spirits, 278, 279, 391-6, 424, 461, 
464 
appeasing, 444 
punish immoral actions, 440 
Spiritual religion, 487, 488, 628 
Starcke, C. M., 144, 173 
State, 60 seq. 88 
The City, 64 seq. 
The modern, 67 seq., 130, 131, 
357 seq. 
Theory of, 586 seq. 
Steinmetz, M., 81, 88, 167, 327 
Stoies, 303, 562 seq. 
Supernatural, 518 
Sutherland, A., 88 
Swanton, J. R., 80, 322, 329, 434 
Sympathy, 15 


Taboo, 55, 88 seq., 146, 318, 378, 
387, 420-21, 423, 440, 446 

Tacitus, 83, 259, 326 

Taoism, 460, 485 seq. 

Taylor, 120, 602 

Theft, punishment of, 76, 319 seq. 

Thomas Aquinas, 349, 

Thucydides, 256-8, 296, 550 

Torture, 121-3, 238, 239, 249, 253 

Totemism, 45, 46, 143, 144, 377, 
382, 397, 401 

Trade guilds, 348 

Trade unionism, 361] 

Tradition, 12-14, 616, 617, 635 seq. 

Traditional morality, 547, 549, 
617, 623, 624 

Transmigration, 369, 474 

Treaties, 248 

Tribal union, 49 seq. 

Tribute, 251 

Truth, 466, 476 

Tylor, E. B., 82, 143, 153, 164, 318, 
reece 371, 376, 392, 426, 431, 
43 


Ulpian, 209, 210, 299 
United States, 229, 230 


647 


Universalism, 261, 303, 316, 495, 
517, 543, 564 

Upanishads, 344, 470-73 

Usury, 345, 346, 477 

Utilitarianism, 125, 572, 587 seq. 


Validity, 576, 577 

Vedas, 252, 462, 463, 470 

Vengeance, 72 seq., 309 

Vice, 556-7 

Vineya texts, 482, 484 

Vinogradoff, Prof., 52, 161, 216, 
303, 306, 307, 308 

Viollet, P., 209, 214-16, 218, 221, 
224, 301, 302, 312,\313, 330 

Virtue for its own sake, 485, 528, 
551 seq. 


Wace and Buchheim, 508 
Wailing for the dead, 368 
Waitz, G., 76, 83, 213 
Wartz, T., 45, 75, 78, 81, 83, 142, 
151, 166-8, 170, 173, 235-7, 
239-46, 273-5, 281, 319, 320, 
338, 431, 438, 440, 441 
Wallace, A. R., 5 
War, 234 seq. 
Chivalry in, 236, 253, 264 
Ethics of, 476 
in classical civilization, 256-61 
in early civilization, 246 seq. 
in uncivilized world, 72, 234 seq. 
in Western Europe, 262 seq. 
Just and unjust, 262, 276, 267 
unknown among some savages, 
234 
Wergild, 77, 78, 300 
Westermarck, E., 52, 87, 135, 144, 
148, 155, 166, 167, 171-6, 263, 
338, 340, 419 
Widow, position of, 188, 195 
Wilamowitz-Mollendorf, U. 
203, 205, 297, 330 
Wilcox, W. F., 230 
Will, 599-600, 616 
Wines, F. H., 125-7 
Wisdom literature, 495 
Wissowa, 404, 429 
Witchcraft, 84, 89, 117, 409, 413 
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 223 
Women, 476, 481, 484, 485 
Attitude to, 199, 200, 202, 203, 
205, 211, 212, 221, 222, 232 
Equality with men, 186-8 
Position of, 31, 132 seq., 203 seq., 
355 
among uncivilized 
167 seq. 


von, 


races, 71, 


648 INDEX 


Women— Xenophon, 206, 257 
in English law, 219 seq. 
in oriental civilization, 179 seq., 
133-8, 190, 191, 195-6, 199-203  Yahveh, 405, 489 seq. . 
in relation to wmarriage-law, 


132, 159 seq. Zechariah, 495 
Rights of unmarried, in Middle Zend Avesta, 86, 464-9 
Ages, 219 Zeno, 549 
Rights of unmarried, in modern Zeus, 403-5, 416 
period, 220 Zimmern, A. E., 205, 206, 297 
Treatment of, in war, 237, 243-4, Zummern, H., 442, 450 
248, 250, 252, 256-7, 259 Zulus, 371 


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